In 1997, a stupendously expensive film was made about the sinking of the Titanic, and the film was stupendously popular. Its success was hardly surprising. Eighty-seven years after the Titanic’s fatal encounter with an iceberg, her story remains intensely interesting–and deservedly so. It is one of the great stories of the world.

During the many decades of the story’s retelling, however, a peculiar thing has happened. The real story, which is the story of individual people and the moral choices they made in their hour of peril, has been replaced by political parables about the arrogance of wealth, the dangers of modern technology, and the pressing need for that dullest of things, government regulation.

The Titanic story began to be politicized as soon as news arrived that the ship had gone down in the North Atlantic during the early hours of April 15, 1912. Senator William Alden Smith, a “progressive” Republican and friend of activist government, called the White House to find out what President Taft intended to do about the disaster. He discovered that Taft did not hold the typical twentieth-century assumption that the president of the United States is responsible for solving every problem in the world. Smith was told that Taft intended to do nothing about the Titanic.

This is not a story about the arrogance of wealth, the hubris of modern technology, or the helplessness of the working class. It is one of the hundreds of stories about individual moral decisions (stories of heroism, stories of disgrace, stories of people doing the best they could) that give the Titanic its perennial interest. They are stories of real people making real choices. We too can choose: do we prefer the reality, or the myth?