Less than a week later, any thought of high society and parties or the reporting thereof was wiped away with one blow by shocking reports that the brand-new deemed-unsinkable flagship of the White Star Line, the RMS Titanic, had hit an iceberg on its way to New York and sunk. Fewer than 700 of the more than 2,220 people on board survived. Among the victims were many prominent New Yorkers, such as steel magnate Benjamin Guggenheim, Macy’s owner Isidor Straus, and John Jacob Astor. The papers had castigated Astor, a divorced man of forty-seven, for marrying an eighteen-year-old classmate of
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