J.P. Morgan: Owner of Titanic

John Pierpont Morgan (April 17, 1837 – March 31, 1913) was a Wall Street banker and the owner of RMS Titanic.  He was the most powerful money man on Wall Street in 1912, the year that Titanic sank.

At the height of his career during the early 1900s, J.P Morgan and his partners had financial investments in many large corporations and monopolies. Morgan owned shipping companies, railroad companies, automobile companies, steel companies, electric companies, rubber companies, mining companies, life insurance companies, telephone companies, telegraph companies, copper wire companies, and even some of the Thomas Edison companies that made lightbulbs, radios, phonographs and movies.

Morgan also collected stocks, bonds, gold, silver, jewels and banks.  He especially liked owning banks.

In 1912 when Titanic sailed, J.P. Morgan was trying to convince the United States government to let him and his Wall Street friends create a monopoly on banks.  Back then another word for monopoly was a "combine" or a "trust."  Morgan was trying to convince people that control over all of the money and the banks in the United States should be combined into one big central bank or "Money Trust" where he and his partners on Wall Street would be the bosses.

This idea for a big central bank or "National Reserve Association" was proposed in a report that one of Morgan's agents, Nelson W. Aldrich, sent to Congress in January 1912, only a few months before the  RMS Titanic's maiden voyage.

Many people did not like this "Aldrich Plan" for a central bank or a bank combine.  They knew that it was actually a Morgan Plan and they did not want Morgan running a big central bank that made him the legal boss over all the little banks.

This was especially true in the small towns and rural areas of the West and Midwest.  The small-town bankers did not want to be legally forced to bundle up all of their "reserves" (the life savings of many hard-working people in the local community) and put them into the hands of J.P. Morgan or his big-city banking friends in Chicago, Denver, St. Louis and New York.

The small-town bankers were pretty sure Morgan's friends on Wall Street would simply use this huge treasure trove of reserves to make a "bubble machine" -- that is, Morgan & Co. would go off on a binge of speculative investing, making bets like drunken sailors because they would think they had the reserves of the entire nation to draw upon if they lost their bets.

Put another way: The careful bankers in lots of farming communities, who had responsibly safeguarded the local community chest for years, were afraid of these big city boys.  They were afraid the hard-earned treasure of their communities was about to be stolen.  Worse: They were afraid this huge war chest might be used to finance and start another war -- maybe even a World War.

Some of the big-city bankers on Wall Street agreed: This plan for a central bank was no good for America.  They were dead set against letting Morgan create a "Money Trust" monopoly on all the banks in the United States.  They decided they were going to fight with Morgan over his plan for a big central bank, and they were going to vote against Morgan and his political allies at the Republican National Convention of 1912.

Guess what?  Some of Morgan's biggest Republican enemies never made it to the convention. They were the millionaires who were on board the Titanic when the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912.  They were heading to New York and Philadelphia to attend the Republican "primaries" (the first round of voting) when they were killed.

Did the Titanic sink by accident when it hit an iceberg? 

The author of this weblog does not think so.  The author thinks that J.P. Morgan deliberately killed his political enemies and many of the other people on board the Titanic by telling the captain to wreck the ship on purpose.

J.P. Morgan and his friends in the newspapers made it look like a big accident.  But it wasn't

The basic claim made by this weblog is that the sinking of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912 was a political conspiracy to commit murder. The goal of this weblog is to prove it.

We will begin by proving that J.P. Morgan owned and controlled the Titanic.   That is done very simply by referring to the weblinks below.

J.P. Morgan's Shipping Trust: The International Mercantile Marine Co.

In 1902, J.P. Morgan organized a shipping monopoly on Wall Street called the International Mercantile Marine Co. (IMM).  That monopoly or "Shipping Trust" bought up several steamship companies in America and England, and one of the shipping companies that Morgan bought in England was called the White Star Line.

The White Star Line and its executive officer, J. Bruce Ismay, took charge of building and operating the RMS Titanic and its sister ships, the RMS Olympic and RMS Britannic. Ismay certainly was in charge of day-to-day operations on board the Titanic because he was the White Star Line's managing director.

But Ismay was not the owner.  He was not the top boss. There was a level of management above him:  the team of Titanic's financial investors.  As with most businesses, the investors have the final say. They call the shots. Who was the top man on the investment totem pole? J.P. Morgan. 

Was J. Bruce Ismay to Blame for the Wreck?

People were very angry at Mr. Ismay after Titanic sank. They hated him. Many newspapers seized on the fact that Ismay got into a life boat while Titanic was sinking.  He survived while other men drowned.  This was considered cowardly and unchivalrous of him.  Consequently, when people wanted to assign blame for the "accident" most decided to assign the blame to Ismay.

The movies and books about Titanic all suggest that J. Bruce Ismay told the Titanic's captain, E.J. Smith, to run at full speed through an ice field. They suggest Mr. Ismay was a vain and stupid man who wanted to set a speed record and get headlines in the newspapers.

But the newspapers, books and movies all ignore the fact that J.P. Morgan owned White Star Line. He was the boss of J. Bruce Ismay, as the links below will prove.

In other words, it may be true that Ismay ordered Captain Smith to maintain full steam in a dangerous ice field. But it is also possible that the original order did not come from Ismay at all.  The order to run at full speed through an ice field may very possibly have come from Ismay's boss: J.P. Morgan.


Owners of the RMS Titanic

International Mercantile Marine Co.(IMM)

   Wikipedia: "International Mercantile Marine Co."
   Wikipedia "International Navigation Company" (INC)
   Wikipedia: "Pennsylvania Railroad"

   Sapphire, William B. "The White Star Line and the International Mercantile Marine Company"

IMM Founders

    J.P. Morgan, Lead Financier
       Wikipedia:  "J.P Morgan "
       Wikipedia: "George Peabody" and "Junius Spencer Morgan"
       Wikipedia: "J.S. Morgan & Co." of London
       Wikipedia: "Morgan, Grenfell & Co." of London and New York
       Wikipedia: "Morgan, Harjes & Co" of Paris
       Wikipedia: "Panic of 1893" and "Rothschild Family"
       Wikipedia: "Anthony Joseph Drexel" of Philadelphia
       Wikipedia: J.P. Morgan & Co. 
       Wikipedia: "United States Steel Corp."
       Wikipedia: "Panic of 1907"
       Wikipedia: "Nelson W. Aldrich" agent of J.P. Morgan
       Wikipedia: "Aldrich-Vreeland Act" of 1908
       Wikipedia: "National Monetary Commission"
       Wikipedia: "Henry Pomeroy Davison" agent of J.P. Morgan

   Clement Griscom, American Line and Red Star Line
       Wikipedia:  "Clement Griscom"
       Wikipedia:  "Mark Hanna"
       Wikipedia:  "William McKinley"

   Bernard N. Baker, Atlantic Transport Line
        Wikipedia:  "Bernard N. Baker"

   John Ellerman, Leyland Line
        Wikipedia: "Sir John Ellerman, 1st Baronet"

   J. Bruce Ismay, White Star Line
        Wikipedia: "Joseph Bruce Ismay"
       Encyclopedia Titanica: "Mr. Joseph Bruce Ismay"

White Star Line

   Wikipedia:  "White Star Line"
   Wikipedia: "List of White Star Line Ships"
   See Also:  Sapphire, William B. "The White Star Line and the International Mercantile Marine Company"

Founder of White Star Line:  Thomas Henry Ismay
   Wikipedia: "Thomas Henry Ismay" 

Chairman of White Star Line:  J. Bruce Ismay
   Wikipedia: "Joseph Bruce Ismay"


Builders of the RMS Titanic

   Wikipedia: "Harland and Wolff"

Power Grab: The Aldrich Plan for a Federal Reserve

 Above: "The Octopus." Frontispiece of Alfred Owen Crozier's book U.S. Money vs. Corporation Currency: "Aldrich Plan" (Cincinnati, OH: The Magnet Co., 1912).

On 9 January 1912, a Report of the National Monetary Commission headed by Rhode Island Sen. Nelson W. Aldrich presented to the Senate Finance Committee of the U.S. Congress a bill to create a  "National Reserve Act" -- a plan popularly known as "The Aldrich Plan."

Wikipedia: "It provided for one great central bank, the National Reserve Association, with a capital of at least $100 million and with 15 branches in various sections. The branches were to be controlled by the member banks on a basis of their capitalization. The National Reserve Association would issue [paper] currency, based on gold and commercial paper, that would be the liability of the bank and not of the government. It would also carry a portion of member banks’ reserves, determine discount reserves, buy and sell on the open market, and hold the deposits of the federal government. The branches and businessmen of each of the 15 districts would elect thirty out of the 39 members of the board of directors of the National Reserve Association.

"Aldrich fought for a private monopoly with little government influence, but conceded that the government should be represented on the Board of Directors."

Put into plain English, this was the bill proposing that Congress create a Federal Reserve System -- a system that would require every single small-town bank in America to park their reserves with a small and secretive group of bankers from Wall Street who would then "look after" the reserves for the federal government.

Oh, by the way, the same group of Wall Street bankers would have the exclusive right to print paper currency for the United States government, and this bill would also require every single citizen of the United States to pay a personal income tax.

Did we mention that the paper currency or "Federal Reserve Notes" would actually be I.O.U.s or loans, on which the federal government would owe interest to the bankers?

Hmmm.  There was a lot to think about in the Aldrich Plan.

After thinking about it for a while, a lot of people (including some pretty rich people, like banker John Jacob Astor IV of New York) decided they didn't much like the sound of the Aldrich Plan.  For some reason, something just didn't sound right.

In fact the Aldrich Plan was so controversial that it was splitting the Republican Party right down the middle during an election year. Many Republicans were backing Morgan, Aldrich and their "Money Trust."  But just as many liberal Republicans thought that this was a classic case of a "bad" monopoly that would hurt small banks, hurt consumers and hurt the country's economy in general.

These "progressive" Republicans wanted to kill this plan for a banking trust, and they planned to vote for Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican trust buster who had initiated 44 anti-trust lawsuits during his eight years in the White House. In 1902 Roosevelt had busted J.P. Morgan's railroad trust, the Northern Securities Corporation, wide open.

Taft was a trust buster too.  In fact, during his four years in the White House, from 1908 to 1912, Taft had brought 90 lawsuits against big business under the Sherman Anti-Trust act.  But Taft did not distinguish between "good monopolies" and "bad monopolies" and he was taking a legal stick to any business that looked big.

Taft had also riled the liberal and "progressive" Republicans of his party by backing the Payne-Aldrich Act -- a racket that enforced high tariffs for the benefit of Aldrich and his cronies but hurt everyone else.

Among the Republican millionaires on board the RMS Titanic, several were friends and business partners of J.P. Morgan, but they were sick of Aldrich and they had decided to kill the Aldrich Plan. They were on board Morgan's ship, but they were not on board with Morgan's political plans.

In fact, when they got to New York, they were planning to attend the upcoming Republican primaries and to do something about it.  They were going to vote Taft and Aldrich down, effectively killing Morgan's plans for a Federal Reserve.

John Jacob Astor was an especially big headache for Morgan.  Morgan's group had invested more than $28 million in the Astor Trust, an important New York bank, but Astor was now talking about back-stabbing Morgan and the circle of Wall Street bankers who wanted to be the leaders of the new "National Reserve Association."

How could this problem be fixed?

Sources:

Keko, Don, "The Taft-Roosevelt Rift: Taft the Trust Buster"
"Ship Building 1903 - 1911 - Taft, William H."  Gobal Security.org

Wikipedia "History of the Federal Reserve System"
Wikipdia "History of Central Banking in the United States"
Wikipedia "1907 - 1913: Creation of the Federal Reserve System"
Wikipedia "Panic of 1907"
Wikipedia "Nelson W. Aldrich"
Wikipedia "Money Trust"
Wilkipdia "Pujo Committee"

Note: The 1913 Pujo Committee Report identified over $22 billion in resources and capitalization controlled through 341 directorships held in 112 corporations by members of the empire headed by J.P. Morgan.

The "Just Missed It Club": Morgan and several friends suddenly decide not to board the Titanic

The following people booked passages on board the RMS Titanic for her maiden voyage across the Atlantic but each of them changed their minds and suddenly decided to pull out.

Why? Were they "just lucky"? Or were they warned not to go on board the Titanic?

It is certainly remarkable that some of the wealthiest members of the "just missed it" club have the following traits in common:  1) They are close associates and business partners of J.P. Morgan, 2) They made financial contributions to the 1912 election campaign for President William H. Taft, and 3) They are members of the Jekyll Island Club in Georgia, location of the notorious Jekyll Island meeting of 1910 at which Nelson Aldrich and several other Morgan associates conspired to create a Federal Reserve Bank.

Here's the list of lucky dogs who cleverly managed to miss a seat on the Titanic:

1. J.P. Morgan, owner of the Titanic, charter member of the Jekyll Island Club and mastermind behind the entire Federal Reserve Bank scheme.

Morgan reportedly stayed behind "when he was given the opportunity to view and purchase a rare set of medieval tapestries outside Chartres, France." He telegraphed, "Business will deny me the pleasure of being one of the first to cross on the finest vessel of the IMM."

Later, when interviewed by reporters after the sinking, he told the New York Times correspondent “Monetary losses amount to nothing in life. It is the loss of life that counts. It is that frightful death.”

According to Henry H. Klein's 2005 book Dynastic America and Those Who Own It (p. 126) , Morgan was a major contributor to the 1912 presidential campaign of William Howard Taft.  If elected, Taft had apparently agreed to help Morgan & Co. push their Federal Reserve plan through Congress.

According to Henry Klein's research:

"Charles P. Taft admitted that he spent $214,000 for his brother, and testified that among the contributors to his brother's campaign fund were John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Pierre DuPont, Harry Payne Whitney, Henry C. Frick, Daniel G. Reid, Oliver H. Payne,  George F. Baker, William H. Moore, William H. Childs, Joseph E. Widener, and E.T. Stotesbury.  Every one of these contributors is a controlling factor in monopoly."

One might add that the list also reads like a Who's Who of Jekyll Island Club members and Morgan business partners.

2. Henry Clay Frick, a Pittsburgh steel baron and close associate of J.P. Morgan, had booked on the Titanic but suddenly found himself indisposed.

Frick was a member of the Jekyll Island Club and a generous contributor to the 1912 campaign to re-elect President William H. Taft.

Newspapers once called Frick "the most hated man in America" because of the brutality with which he used Pinkerton agents and the Pennsylvania state militia to break the 1892 Homestead Strike at Andrew Carnegie's steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania.

In 1901, Frick played a central role in brokering a massive merger between Carnegie and Morgan steel interests. All of the merged companies rolled into one became the U.S. Steel Corp.  By 1912, Taft and his federal agents had brought a massive anti-trust lawsuit against U.S. Steel, claiming that it was a monster-sized monopoly that needed to be busted.

When Andrew Carnegie took the stand, he blamed all the dirty deals and back-room politics that made the U.S. Steel merger possible on Frick. The lawyers took a stick to Frick, and in January 1912, Mr. and Mrs. Frick sailed to Europe for a long vacation.

Quentin R. Skrabec's 2010 biography Henry Clay Frick: The Life of the Perfect Capitalist (p. 206) tells us: "In early 1912, Frick and family (Adelaide and Helen) made an extensive four-month European trip, which also included a visit to Egypt.  His friend J. Horace Harding, an art collector and financial advisor, accompanied them.  Harding was a partner of J.P. Morgan and Frick's New York neighbor.  They had become friends because of their shared interest in art and flowers. They also served on a number of boards including the Tobacco Products Corporation. J. Horace Harding would become a director of the Frick Collection after Henry Clay's death.

"The party also included Helen's friend Francis Dixon and Egyptologist George Reisner of Harvard.  Frick had recently helped fund Reisner's explorations, and Reisner would be an excellent guide for the family.  J.P. Morgan was also on a collecting and business trip in Europe, and they would meet briefly.  The tour included Rome, the Vatican, and Pompeii."

Note: The Fricks, the Hardings, the Astors and Margaret T. "Molly" Brown were all on the same tour of Egypt just prior to the Titanic disaster.  They seem to have returned via Paris, and J.P. Morgan was in or around Paris at the same time, allegedly trying to arrange for the shipment of his tapestries to the United States.

Margaret Brown and her daughter Helen stayed at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.  When Margaret received a telegram at the hotel desk informing her that her grandson in California was sick, she decided on impulse to board the Titanic along with the Astors.  Helen Brown wanted to accompany her mother, but her friends in Paris begged her to stay.

Strangely, after Titanic had sunk and Margaret arrived in New York, she learned from her perplexed son that the grandson in question "had not been sick a single day." The telegram was mistaken.

The Astors and Molly Brown boarded Titanic at Cherbourg, France, as did Benjamin Guggenheim and journalist William T. Stead.

The Fricks and the Hardings, however, suddenly made other plans. Frick told reporters that he had to cancel his trip on Titanic when he learned that his wife, Adelaide, had sprained her ankle in Italy.

3.  J. Horace Harding of Philadelphia and New York, was a J.P. Morgan partner, railroad investor and director of the C.P. Barney Banking empire (later called Smith-Barney). Harding was a stout Republican, a 1912 supporter of Taft for president, and his wife Dorothea Barney Harding  is listed as a member of the Jekyll Island Club.  Mr. Harding himself joined the Jekyll Island Club in 1916.

The Hardings were art collectors  "who had toured Egypt with the Fricks."  Initially they booked the Titanic parlor suite that J.P. Morgan himself had abandoned, Suite B 52/54/56.  But the Hardings abruptly cancelled when they "managed to book an earlier trip back" on board the Mauretania -- a Cunard line ship not owned by Morgan. The parlor suite was then reserved for the White Star Line's executive director, J. Bruce Ismay.

The source of the Harding family's wealth is something of a mystery.  There is no doubt the family were very wealthy indeed. The Hardings had four children, Charles, Catherine, Laura and William Harding and a short sketch of Laura B. Harding, found in William J. Mann's 2007 biography Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn (page 149), gives us more detail:

"Laura Harding grew up in a six-story town house at 955 Fifth Avenue filled with gilded Louis XV antiques, Chinese porcelain vases, and paintings by such 18th-century masters as Joshua Reynolds, Henry Raeburn, and Thomas Gainsborough . . . . Laura Barney Harding was born in June 1902 at her family's estate on Philadelphia's Main Line.  Her mother, Dorothea Barney, was the granddaughter of Jay Cooke, the banker known as "the financier of the Civil War" for his handling of U.S. war bonds.  Cooke's daughter married Charles Barney, who founded the brokerage firm that later became Smith-Barney; Laura's father, J. Horace Harding, would serve as senior partner for the firm.

"Horace would, in fact, serve as director for many companies . . . .  No matter where it came from, J. Horace Harding's wealth was considerable; at his death the New York Times estimated it as 'running into millions.' "

The book Trust Companies of the United States (Audit Company of New York, 1913) lists J. Horace Harding on page 280 as a director of the Metropolitan Trust Co. of the City of New York and the Columbia-Knickerbocker Trust.

The Knickerbocker Trust was at the epicenter of the great Wall Street Panic of 1907, during which Knickerbocker's president Charles T. Barney  failed in his efforts to corner the copper market.  Barney begged J.P Morgan for a loan to cover his losses.  Morgan refused, and Barney then blew his brain out on 14 November 1907.

The result was a run on the Knickerbocker bank, and when Knickerbocker failed, there was mass panic on the Street and a run on many banks. This was the series of tragic events that prompted Morgan and his friends on Wall Street to "rescue" the banks by buying them up.

In early 1908 Morgan's crowd began calling for the creation of a National Reserve Association or Federal Reserve. Many people on the Street and in the press were less than sympathetic, wondering out loud how the hell Morgan had become so powerful that he could buy up half the banks that failed in the panic.  They suspected that the "National Reserve Association" plan was simply Part II in an effort to monopolize the entire banking market.

When Taft won the election of 1908 and began filing anti-trust lawsuits right and left, Morgan and his friends put their Federal Reserve plan on hold.  They got it rolling again in January 1912, after four years of "research" in Europe and after cutting a deal with Taft.

In late 1912, the Columbine Trust bought up Knickerbocker's remaining assets and brought onto the new trust's board of directors J. Horace Harding. He was, after all, the son-in-law of Charles T. Barney, the late lamented head of Knickerbocker Trust, and as director of the C.D. Barney Bank firm,  J. Horace was clearly placed on the board to represent the Barney family's interests.

In 1914, J. Horace Harding became a director of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, according to the Electric Railway Journal, vol. 44, p. 642.  Electric railways were a major part of the Morgan empire.  It didn't hurt that J. Horace was also the President of the Northwestern Power Company, which held all the stock for the Great Northern Power Company. 

In 1916 Harding is listed as an officer of J.P. Morgan's Guarantee Trust Co and a stock investor in the Chicago Great Western Railroad, a railroad that J.P. Morgan bought up and "reorganized" in 1909.

Moody's Manual of Investments for 1917 lists J. Horace Harding as a director of the American Express Corporation (sitting across the boardroom table from Cornelius Vanderbilt and William Vincent Astor, son of the same John Jacob Astor IV who died on Titanic).

The Guarantee Trust Co. was at the heart of J.P. Morgan's financial empire, and each of the railroads mentioned was associated with Morgan's railroad empire.  It is therefore safe to say that Harding was a close associate of J.P. Morgan and a key player in many of Morgan's schemes, especially those dealing with banks, electric railways, and the plans to create a Federal Reserve system.

4. George Washington Vanderbilt and his wife, Edith Stuyvesant Vanderbilt, found themselves unable to board the Titanic after a little bird whispered something in their ears.

Mrs. Vanderbilt said her sister, Susan Dresser, had vehemently opposed their boarding Titanic on the grounds that "The first trip of any ship is dangerous."  A conflicting story says that George's mother cabled him to avoid the Titanic since "Maiden voyages are always so troublesome with crowds and media." Supposedly an obedient son, George complied with her wishes.

Vanderbilt was the millionaire owner of the Biltmore Estate, and his family ran a colossal empire of shipping and railroad interests that overlapped with J.P. Morgan's empire. His network had excellent intelligence sources.

Perhaps one should also note that George's older brother, William K. Vanderbilt, was a founding member of the Jekyll Island Club, and joined in the same year as J.P. Morgan (1886).

5. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, the son of George Washington Vanderbilt and heir to the Vanderbilt family's vast shipping and railroad empire.  He "canceled his passage on the Titanic so late that some early newspaper accounts listed him as being on board."

Alfred Vanderbilt lived on to become one the most celebrated casualties of the Lusitania sinking three years later, in April 1915.

6. Robert Bacon, the American ambassador to France.

 

7.  David Blair, Titanic's Second Officer, suddenly removed from the Titanic roster and moved to the RMS Olympic for unexplained reasons.  Blair left the ship's binoculars in a drawer in his state room, which is why the lookouts had no binoculars at the time of the ship's collision with the iceberg.

8. Gugliemo Marconi, Italian inventor of wireless telegraphy and winner of the 1909 Noble Prize in physics, was offered free passage on Titanic but took the Lusitania three days earlier.  Three years later, Marconi was on board the Lusitania in April 1915, on the voyage just before the one that was sunk by a German U-Boat

9. Milton Snavely Hershey, Chocolates millionaire from Pennsylvania.  His archive has records of a $300 check written December 1911 to White Star Line for passage on the Titanic, but pressing business required him to leave earlier on board the S.S. Amerika.

 

10.  Fr. Frank Browne, SJ, who was only a student at the time.  Browne's uncle, Robert Browne, was the Bishop of Cloyne and had given young Frank a nice graduation gift: A new camera and enough money to tour the continent. The trip included a free ticket to return to Ireland on board a luxury liner, the Titanic.  On April 12, Frank boarded the "Titanic Special" train at London's Waterloo Station, arrived at the dock and got on the big ship for its first leg, from Southampton to Queenstown (Cobh), Ireland.  Frank took lots of pictures of the beautiful rooms and people on the ship.  A wealthy couple on Titanic took a fancy to Frank, and they offered to pay his passage all the way to New York  City. But when he sent a telegraph to request permission to go to New York, his uncle the Bishop sent back the following stern reply:  "Get off that ship -- Provincial!" Fr. Brown lived to become a senior member of the Jesuit Order and a famous photographer.  His famous "last photos" of Titanic are some of the best we have, and they have been collected and published as a fancy coffee-table book.

11. Rev. Henry S. Nesbitt, his wife and five children

12. Rev. J. Stuart Holden, vicar of St. Paul's Church, Portman Square, London

13. Archbishop Thomas J. Madden of Liverpool

14.  Rev. J.S. Wardell Stafford, fraternal delegate of the Wesleyan Church of Great Britain

15.  Norman Craig, KC, MP

16. Hon. J. Conan Middleton

17.  Sir Charles Ross of Toronto

18. Col. J. Warren Hitchens

19.  Mr. and Mrs. J. Clifford Wilson and their daughters Dorothy and Edith

20.  Frank Kind, a Philadelphia jeweler,

Sources: 

Daugherty, Greg.  "Seven Famous People Who Missed the Titanic" Smithsonian Magazine, March 2012

Gutowski, Melanie Linn.  "Titanic's 'Just Missed It' Club An Elite Group," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 15 April 2012

Eaton, John P.  "Cancelled Passages Aboard Titanic," Voyage, 6 April 2008, from Encylopedia Titanica

Wikipedia: "Francis Browne"

Millionaires Who Did Board Titanic

Old Friends of Teddy Roosevelt

Col. John Jacob Astor IV
Maj. Archibald Butt

Silver Barons opposed to paper currency

Margaret Tobin Brown
Benjamin Guggenheim

Zionist Opposition

Isidor and Ida Straus

Pennsylvanian Railroad and Coal Clique

William and Lucile Carter
John Borland Thayer Jr.
John Borland Thayer III

Canadians

Charles Hays, railroad business rival of Morgan's
Harry Molson

Collateral Damage

Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and his wife Lucile
William Dulles
Frederick Maxfield Hoyt

Clarence Moore
Countess of Rothes
Emil Taussig
George Dunton Widener and Eleanor

Battle of the Titans: Taft v Roosevelt

Many of the Republican millionaires on board RMS Titanic were heading home to Philadelphia to participate in the party primary that was being held there from 13 to 16 April 1912.

The Republican Primaries of April 1912 marked the beginning of a deep split in the Republican Party, resulting from a Titanic power struggle between the incumbent President William Howard Taft (Morgan's agent) and former president Theodore Roosevelt (backed by J.J. Astor and other men who had served with Roosevelt in Cuba).

A Vicious Power Struggle within the Republican Party

This was the first year for Republican primaries.

Roosevelt overwhelmingly won the primaries — and yet, through clever maneuvering by Morgan and Taft, he lost the party nomination.

Roosevelt won 9 out of 12 states (8 by landslide margins). Taft won only the state of Massachusetts (by a small margin); he even lost his home state of Ohio to Roosevelt.

Senator Robert M. La Follette, an anti-Morgan reformer who loudly opposed the Aldrich Plan, won two states.

Through the primaries, Senator LaFollette won a total of 36 delegates; President Taft won 48 delegates; and Roosevelt won 278 delegates.

That means Roosevelt won the Republican Party's nomination to run as their candidate for president, right? Wrong!

Dirty Tricks Campaign

Unfortunately for Teddy, 36 states did not hold primaries. Their delegates were chosen by state conventions, which were controlled by party politics, not by the voter. Many of the state delegates were contested.
Taft controlled the Republican National Committee, which had the power to make decisions on contested delegates. They awarded 235 of the contested delegates to Taft and 19 to Roosevelt. As a result, Roosevelt's delegates abstained from voting at his request.

The 1912 National Convention of the Republican Party of the United States was held at the Chicago Coliseum, Chicago, Illinois, from June 18 to June 22, 1912. The party nominated William Howard Taft from Ohio for re-election as President of the United States and James S. Sherman of New York for re-election as Vice President.

Sherman died days before the election, and was replaced as Republican vice-presidential nominee by Nicholas M. Butler of New York.

Sources:

Wikipedia:  "1912 Republican National Convention"

Secret Agent: Maj. Archibald Butt, President Taft's military aide

Above: Butt

Major Archibald Willingham Butt (September 26, 1865 – April 15, 1912) was an influential military aide to U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Before becoming an aide to Roosevelt, Butt had pursued a career in journalism and served in the Spanish-American War. He died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic.

On January 2, 1900, Butt received a commission as a Captain of United States Volunteers in the United States Army.^[1] He served in the Philippines from 1900 to 1904. While he was in the Philippines, he had a part in founding the Military Order of the Carabao, a tongue-in-cheek spoof of military fraternal organization that is still in operation today. In 1904, he was made Depot Quartermaster of Washington, D.C., where he met President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1906, he was sent to Cuba to as part of a pacification force. In 1908, now a captain, Butt was recalled to Washington to serve as chief military aide to President Roosevelt. When William Howard Taft became President the following year, Butt stayed on in the same capacity. In 1911, Butt was promoted to the rank of major.

 

Above: Butt on the White House portico, with Robert Baden-Powell, President Taft and British ambassador Bryce in the foreground (1912-02-03)

 

During his time serving with two presidents, Butt wrote almost daily letters to his sister-in-law Clara, of Augusta, Georgia. These letters are a key source of information on the more private events of these two presidencies and provide insights into the respective characters of Roosevelt and Taft. 

By 1912, Taft's first term was coming to an end and Roosevelt, who had fallen out with Taft, was known to be considering a run against him. Very close to both men and fiercely loyal, Butt was caught in the middle. As his health was deteriorating during this period, his friend Francis Davis Millet asked Taft to give him a leave of absence to recuperate before the presidential primaries began. Taft agreed and ordered Butt to go on vacation.

Butt left on a six-week vacation to Europe. He was accompanied for part of his vacation by the American painter Francis Davis Millet, his longtime friend. Butt's only known official work during his vacation was a visit with Pope Pius X, during which he delivered to the pontiff a personal message from Taft.

Butt booked his return passage on the RMS Titanic. He boarded the Titanic at Southampton, UK on April 10, 1912; his partner Millet boarded the ship at Cherbourg, France later that same day.

Butt was playing cards on the night of April 14 in the first-class smoking room when the Titanic struck an iceberg. The ship sank two and half hours later, with a loss of over 1500 souls.

Major Butt's actions on board the ship while it was sinking are largely unverified, but many accounts of a typically sensationalist nature were published by newspapers after the disaster. According to some accounts, Titanic captain Edward J. Smith informed Butt that the "ship was doomed" and that "lifeboats were being readied." Butt immediately began acting as another officer of the ship, herding women and children into the lifeboats. One account tells of Butt preventing desperate steerage passengers trying to escape. Walter Lord's book A Night to Remember disagrees with claims that Butt acted like an officer, claiming he was more likely quietly observing the ship's evacuation. Butt was last seen in the smoking room, making no attempt to save himself. He went down with the Titanic; his remains were not found.

Millet's body was recovered after the sinking and was buried in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Butt appears and plays a significant role in Jack Finney's time travel novel, From Time to Time. In it, Butt was sent to Europe by President Taft and former President Roosevelt in an effort to stave off World War I. In Europe, he apparently gets the necessary assurances to make a European war impossible. However, even when informed of the ship's approaching sinking by the time traveling protagonist, he refuses to save himself and his mission when women and children will perish. His mission fails with his death.

Source:

Wikipedia "Archibald Butt"

Isidore Straus's mission to Palestine

Isidor Straus owner of Macy's department store, and his wife Ida, were returning from a visit to Palestine when they died.  Their death so strongly affected Isidor's brother and business partner, Nathan Straus (who had accompanied them on the trip to Palestine but "just missed" the Titanic), that Nathan gave away most of his fortune to the Zionist cause and to several charities.

Another Straus brother, Oscar Straus, served as U.S. minister to the Ottoman Empire from 1887 to 1889, and again from 1898 to 1899.  In 1906 Oscar became the United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor under president Theodore Roosevelt, which meant Oscar was in charge of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and shipping lines. He worked closely with police and the Secret Service to deport immigrants with anarchist beliefs and to enforce the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903. 

In 1909-1910, Oscar Straus served as U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and in 1912, shortly after Titanic sank, he ran for governor of New York.