Jay Fox comments on the sinking of the Titanic. Joseph Bruce Ismay was the Chairman of the White Star Line which owned the Titanic. He survived the disaster.

‘The Titanic and Ismayism’ by Jay Fox from The Agitator. Vol. 2 No. 12. May 1, 1912.

In a mad world with a mad people racing madly against time, is it any wonder there is a Titanic wrecked? A gigantic ten million dollar floating palace, specially designed to carry the exploiters of toil across the Atlantic in luxury and with swiftness, is driven madly over the shorter and dangerous Northern course, and, despite the warning of danger, is kept at full speed till it crashes into a ponderous iceberg and sinks, like a stone, two miles into the sea. The sea was calm and every one of the twenty-five hundred passengers and crew could have been saved, had the money-mad exploiters made provision for such an emergency.

Sixteen hundred go to the bottom and the politicians will make capital out of the “investigation.” Is Ismay the cause? Nonsense. He is simply supplying a mad world with what it wants on a paying basis. The exploiters, twelve of them “worth” 200,000,000 dollars, were as reckless of human life as Ismay, as their records will show, and every immigrant envied the masters for their luxurious seats on the backs of toiling humanity.

But the congressional investigators will fix the blame on Ismay and he will be branded a “bad” capitalist and roundly scored for his “criminal negligence”; and the mad world will rush desperately on and forget in a week that he ever existed.

They will brand Ismay as the cause, but they will not touch the cause of Ismay. They will not go to the base of the madness. As well rail at the iceberg as to rail at Ismay. Ismay, like the iceberg, is an effect. Ismay is an iceberg floating on the social sea, more. dangerous than the iceberg on the North Atlantic. We can sail south and escape the iceberg, but we cannot escape Ismay; for Ismay, the type, the symbol of money-madness, abounds everywhere.

Sixteen hundred at the bottom of the sea are but a few of the victims of Ismay; the few whose exit was dramatic, who were accompanied by the soothing strains of music and a dozen Ismayans “worth” nearly $200,000,000.

The earth engulfs more victims than the sea. The mines swallow them, the railroads crush them, the factories grind them, hunger devours them; and the Ismayans rush madly on in vain pursuit of the fleeting pleasures promised by the possession of millions extracted by force from the hives of Industry. The Ismayan perverted passions must be satiated, no matter what becomes of the millions who travel in the steerage of the Titanics they build and go to the bottom in silence. Dumb brutes, what do they know about heroism, where is the pathos in their parting with husbands and wives and children? Like the rats in the hold, let them sink into the oblivion which is their lot in this mad world.

The Syndicalist began as The Agitator by Earl Ford, JW Johnstone, and William Z Foster in 1911. Inspired by the revolutionary syndicalism of the French CGT, they felt they were political competitors to the IWW and in early 1912, Foster and others created the Syndicalist Militant Minority Leagues in Chicago with chapters soon forming in Kansas City, Omaha, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Denver, Seattle, Tacoma, Vancouver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They renamed The Agitator The Syndicalist as the paper of the Syndicalist League of North America with Jay Fox as editor. The group then focused on the AFL. The Syndicalist ceased publication in September 1913 with some going on to form the International Trade Union Educational League in January 1915. While only briefly an organization, the SLNA had a host of future important leaders of the Communist movement. Like Foster, Tom Mooney and Earl Browder who were also members.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/agitator/v2n12-w36-may-01-1912-agitator.pdf