In case any of you aren’t already aware, we’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic (April 15, 2012). I say “in case any of you aren’t already aware” because it feels like I’m seeing Titanic-related stories in the various media I consume on a nearly daily basis.
So I almost didn’t even read this Titanic-related story that was sent to me this morning. I’m glad I did, because it’s a beautifully tragic tale of forbidden love between an artist and a military man who went down with the ship that night. I’ve included an excerpt below — head over to The Daily to read the rest, courtesy of author Richard Davenport-Hines.
When the Titanic sank, Maj. Archibald Butt, a military adviser to President William Howard Taft and former aide-de-camp to his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, was among the heroes of the hour. Amid the disaster on the night of April 14-15, 1912, Butt fulfilled all the archetypes of manly courage, escorting women from their cabins to lifeboats, standing back to let them live and facing death with selflessness. One of the women he helped to save — he had known her when she gave music lessons to the Roosevelt children in the White House — later testified that after he helped her into the lifeboat, he tucked a blanket around her with careful nonchalance, as if she was going for a breezy ride in an open car.
Taft wept when it was confirmed that Butt was lost in the freezing Atlantic Ocean. Much of Washington grieved. In the press rooms of the White House and the War, State and Navy buildings, as one reporter wrote at the time, “the name of Maj. Archie Butt, once synonymous of laughter and jest, now symbolic of heroism, was repeated while eyes blurred and voices became queerly strained.” Ever since 1912, writers have depicted Butt as an archetypal Southerner and military officer. They have not noticed, or have shrunk from mentioning, that his was also love story, a story involving another man, Frank Millet.
Heheh… Major Butt.
Alas, this otherwise moving article’s greater focus on Butt leaves out several crucial facts about Millet, including what a great man he was in his own right, and is apparently unaware of others. Gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz devoted an entire chapter to Millet’s various relationships in his book, “Love Stories.” Most of it is about Millet’s passionate affair with fellow writer Charles Warren Stoddard with whom he lived for a time, and to whom he wrote many romantic letters that survive. But Katz also notes that between his affair with Stoddard and meeting Butt [some 15 years younger], Millet married Elizabeth Greely Merrill in Paris in 1879 with no less than Mark Twain as groom’s witness and PT Barnum a witness for the bride, and sired four children. Unfortunately, Katz doesn’t explain how 13 years later came to live with Butt in Washington, nor the inconsistencies between his noting that, in between, Millet had formed an artist colony in the English small town Broadway with painter John Singer Sargent, et al., and obituaries which stated Millet was a resident of Broadway when he died, and “left a widow and three children.” Katz does express the opinion that Millet, unlike Stoddard, was bisexual, but only describes Butt as Millet’s “close friend.” While other materials could have been discovered since Katz did his research, until I see the material that the Daily article is based upon, I remain skeptical of how much about their alleged love affair is documented fact, and how much is imagination. What is undeniable is that the author is unequivocally wrong in his assertion that “No one remembered seeing” Millet because a number of contemporaneous Titanic survivor accounts mention not only seeing him but reported he helped women and children into lifeboats, too.
Unfortunately, the author of the article has based his conclusions about Major Butt solely on lame stereotypes instead of on historical documentation. I’ve examined all of Major Butt’s private papers and have written a three-volume, 2,400-page biography of the man and haven’t found the slightest indication that he was a homosexual. Quite the opposite, in fact, because at least twice during his life Major Butt was deeply in love with two different women and was heartbroken when they married other men. The author of the above article emphasizes the fact that Frank Millet lived in Major Butt’s home, but he makes no mention of the several heterosexual men who shared the same house at the very same time. (I suspect that this awkward fact would have weakened the author’s undocumented premise about Archie’s sexuality.) All in all, the above article is very poor history indeed.