Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster Page A

common; the Olympic and the Titanic would never have been built without the lucrative transatlantic immigrant trade to fill their lower decks. The accommodations the Titanic offered its poorer passengers, however, bore no resemblance to the squalid disease-ridden warrens that stood on Astor-owned properties. Descriptions of these by the crusading writer and photographer Jacob Riis in the 1890s had caused Colonel Astor to unload some of the worst of his holdings by 1900.
    FRANK MILLET HAD likely spent most of April 11 immersed in paperwork—shipboard days were good for that. He had a lecture on period costumes to give in early May, a progress report to write on the American Academy building on the Janiculum Hill, and he had to prepare for the pending Fine Arts Commission meeting regarding the Lincoln Memorial. Architect Daniel Burnham, the chairman of the commission, needed Millet’s persuasive gifts to keep the politicians who made up the Lincoln Memorial Commission from making a hash of their plans. Burnham, who headed a large Chicago architecture firm that had designed such Gilded Age landmarks as New York’s Flatiron Building and Washington’s Union Station, had become fast friends with Frank during the construction of the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1892–93. Burnham was the man responsible for conjuring up a city of grand boulevards, canals, and classical facades from some scrubby acres of Chicago waterfront, and Frank Millet’s unfailing good humor and gift for managing people under impossible deadlines had made him Burnham’s closest lieutenant.
    As the fair was about to open in May of 1893, Burnham asked Millet to become his director of functions and dream up events to boost attendance. Frank soon devised a host of parades, special days, and fireworks displays, but his most outrageous success was a gala evening called the Midway Ball. For this event, Turkish belly dancers and African and South Sea Island women from the Midway’s replica villages were invited to a formal dance attended by directors of the fair and other leading citizens of Chicago. The newspapers described men in white tie and tails “swinging black Amazons with bushy hair and teeth necklaces” around the dance floor. For the late-night buffet, Frank devised a menu with dishes like “Roast Missionary à la Dahomey” and “Boiled Camel Humps à la Cairo Street.” To the Chicago Tribune the ball was “the strangest gathering since the destruction of the Tower of Babel.”

     

     
    Daniel Burnham and a model of Henry Bacon’s design for the Lincoln Memorial (photo credit 1.36)
    Nineteen years after the Chicago exposition, Burnham and Millet were comrades-in-arms once again, on a project they knew was of great historic significance. Both had been young men when Lincoln was assassinated and had clear memories of the deep national grief that had ensued. For a memorial to the martyred president, Burnham had long supported a site overlooking the Potomac; he wanted the monument to be set apart from other structures and to extend the Mall, aligned to the Capitol and the Washington Monument. But Joseph Cannon, the gruff and influential former Speaker of the House known as “Uncle Joe,” was determined to keep the memorial away from “that God-damned swamp” by the river. He favored a site across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and thought that Southern members of Congress would support him. Burnham soon dispatched Frank Millet to seek out key Southern representatives and seed the notion that it would never do for the memorial to the “conquerer” to be placed on the land of the “conquered”—Arlington, after all, belonged to the sacred South.
    Burnham had also asked Millet to write a report containing the Fine Arts Commission’s recommendations, and by August 10, 1911, the Memorial Commission had accepted its main points and had agreed to hire architect Henry Bacon of New York to draw up a preliminary design. Only a few weeks