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

later, however, Joe Cannon persuaded the commission to engage architect John Russell Pope to create a competing design for two sites other than the one by the Potomac. By December both Bacon and Pope had models ready for display. Bacon’s Doric temple design had many symbolic elements and featured a statue of Lincoln inside with two chambers on either side carved with words from his Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses. The design from John Russell Pope seemed rather pedestrian by comparison—a statue of Lincoln surrounded by a double row of columns—and the proposed sites for it were not particularly distinguished.
    Frank Millet returned from Rome for the decisive meeting on February 3, 1912, when the Potomac Park site had finally won the day. But “Uncle Joe” and some of his cronies were still dissatisfied and angling to change the design. So Millet no doubt took time on the Titanic to gird himself for his next encounter with the fractious members of the Lincoln Memorial Commission.
    Daniel Burnham would not be present at that meeting. On Saturday, April 13, the architect was leaving for Europe with his wife and daughter and son-in-law for a grand tour that would run into the summer. The ship he had chosen was the Olympic , and after dinner on Sunday night he would think of his old friend Millet, traveling in near-identical surroundings in the opposite direction. Burnham would summon a steward and write out a Marconi message to Frank Millet on the Titanic . He would not receive a reply.
    AT 6 P.M . on Thursday, April 11, the sound of the Titanic ’s bugler was heard on deck, indicating it was time for passengers to dress for dinner. The dress code had been waived on the first night at Cherbourg but from then onward “full dress was always en règle ” as the Washington aristocrat and amateur historian Archibald Gracie noted approvingly. For Gracie and the other first-class men, this simply meant donning white tie and tails or a tuxedo, a standard part of any traveling wardrobe. Archie Butt had slightly more sartorial choice since his seven trunks were packed with both his regular and dress uniforms along with civilian evening wear. (At the White House, Archie often changed clothes six times a day.) For this first formal evening he may have simply chosen his regular uniform or even civilian mufti, reserving a show of gold lace for later in the voyage. Most of the women, too, had a different gown packed in tissue paper for each night of the crossing but were saving their most splendid apparel for Sunday or Monday night.
    The beauty of the women on board “was a subject both of observation and admiration” according to Archibald Gracie. This display of loveliness, however, took considerable effort, making the “dressing hour” a stressful time for ladies’ maids. The array of undergarments alone would baffle a modern woman, beginning with the corsets that most upper-class women still wore. The formidable whalebone devices of the Victorian era were a thing of the past, as were the padded S-curve corsets that had pushed the bosom forward and the derrière backward in the style so favored by King Edward VII. After 1907 a longer, slimmer look was in fashion and corsets had elastic gusset inserts that were supposed to make them less constricting.
    But in 1912 a rebellion against the long reign of the corset was beginning. American debutantes had adoped a “park your corset” fad that year, where the constricting undergarments were shucked and left in dressing rooms at dances and parties. Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, had introduced a corsetless gown in her spring 1912 collection, and in the current issue of the fashion magazine Dress , which some first-class ladies had probably brought on board, it was noted: “Quite as important as the more frivolous bits of underdress is the brassiere for the woman who wants to look pretty and be comfortable.”
    Yet the brassiere would not find wide acceptance till after World