The inquiry was heavily criticized in Britain, both for its conduct and for Smith's style of questioning, which on one occasion saw him asking
Titanics Fifth Officer
Harold Lowe if he knew what an iceberg was made of. Lowe's response was "Ice, I suppose, sir". Smith was unfamiliar with life at sea and asked a number of questions exposing this, including asking lookout Frederick Fleet whether he would ever eat in the crow's nest and constantly asking wireless operator Harold Bride and Marconi company engineer Frederick Sammis to confirm what frequently used code signals like
CQD meant. Even though
Titanic was indirectly owned by an American consortium, International Mercantile Marine, the inquiry was seen as an attack on the British shipping industry, and an affront to British honor. The subcommittee was criticized for having the audacity to subpoena British subjects while Smith was ridiculed for his apparent naiveté. He became the butt of music-hall jokes and was given the nickname of "Watertight" Smith. London's leading music-hall venue, the
Hippodrome, offered him $50,000 to perform there on stage on any subject he liked, an offer that was not taken up, and the press mocked Smith relentlessly as a fool, an ignoramus and an ass. One satirical song of the time went: I'm Senator Smith of the USA, Senator Smith, that's me! A big bug in the enquiry way, Senator Smith, that's me! You're fixed right up if you infer I'm a cuss of a cast-iron character. When I says that a thing has got ter be, That thing's as good as done, d'yer see? I'm going to ask questions and find out some If I sit right here till kingdom come – That's me! Senator Smith of the USA. Many newspapers published scathing editorial cartoons depicting Smith in unflattering terms, such as the Irish cartoonist David Wilson's illustration of
"The Importance of being Earnest", published by
The Graphic. Such views crossed party and class divides.
The Morning Post asserted that "a schoolboy would blush at Mr. Smith's ignorance" while the
Daily Mirror denounced him for having "made himself ridiculous in the eyes of British seamen. British seamen know something about ships. Senator Smith does not."
The Graphic claimed that the Senator had "set the whole world laughing by the appalling ignorance betrayed by [his] questions." The
Daily Telegraph suggested that the inquiry was fatally flawed by employing non-experts, which had "effectively illustrated the inability of the lay mind to grasp the problem of marine navigation." Similar concerns were expressed by the
Daily Mail, which complained that "it has no technical knowledge, and its proceedings ... show a want of familiarity with nautical matters and with the sea", and by the
Evening Standard, which criticized the inquiry for being "as expert in investigating marine matters as a country magistrate's bench might have been." Smith's own antecedents attracted ridicule; the
Daily Express called him "a backwoodsman from Michigan", which the newspaper characterized as a state "populated by kangaroos and by cowboys with an intimate acquaintance of
prairie schooners as the only kind of boat". His closing speech to the Senate came in for particularly harsh criticism from the British press, which termed it "bombastic", "grotesque" and "a violent, unreasoning diatribe." The British government was also hostile towards the inquiry. Sir
Edward Grey, the
Foreign Secretary, spoke of his contempt for the way the senator had put the blame in a "denunciatory" fashion on the inadequate regulations implemented by the British Board of Trade. The British Ambassador to the United States,
James Bryce, demanded that President Taft should dissolve the committee and refused to recognise its jurisdiction. Some British writers, however, applauded the inquiry.
G. K. Chesterton contrasted the American objective of maximum openness with what he called Britain's "national evil", which he described as being to "hush everything up; it is to damp everything down; it is to leave the great affair unfinished, to leave every enormous question unanswered." He argued that "it does not much matter whether Senator Smith knows the facts; what matters is whether he is really trying to find them out." The
Review of Reviews, whose founder
William Stead was among the victims of the disaster, declared: "We prefer the ignorance of Senator Smith to the knowledge of Mr. Ismay. Experts have told us the
Titanic was unsinkable – we prefer ignorance to such knowledge!" The American reaction was also generally positive. The
New York Herald published a supportive editorial commenting: "Nothing has been more sympathetic, more gentle in its highest sense than the conduct of the inquiry by the Senate committee, and yet self-complacent moguls in England call this impertinent ... This country intends to find out why so many American lives were wasted by the incompetency of British seamen, and why women and children were sent to their deaths while so many British crew have been saved." The American press welcomed Smith's findings and accepted his recommendations, commending the senator for establishing the key facts of the disaster.
Adaptations Tom Kuntz published an edited version of the Senate hearings in 1998. A multi-cast audiobook version of the Kuntz version won a 1999
Audie Award. ==See also==