There were, writes Bier, two criteria for bodies being preserved for land burial. Yet because burial at sea was predicated on class, the families of victims in third class were less likely to be presented with such a body.” Even if they did, explains Bier, “an identifiable body had to be recovered before the family of the deceased could receive a life insurance payout. Wealthier passengers “would almost certainly have life insurance policies that would pay for their burial or cremation.” Working and middle classes were much less likely to have life insurance. The relatively new idea of life insurance assigned monetary value to (certain) bodies. Approximately one-third of the recovered bodies, some 114 of them, were returned to the very waters from which they’d been pulled. Bier contrasts the preservation and return of well-off victims with the rapid decomposition and burial at sea of the less well-off. Class distinction also, it seems, extended beyond death. “From the allegations that some steerage passengers were locked below decks, to the overwhelming better chances of survival for first-class passengers, such distinctions were assumed to be a natural part of society,” writes Bier. The Titanic’s microcosm of class distinctions is now infamous.
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