GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Perhaps it was his background as a newsboy in Grand Rapids, but U.S. Sen. William Alden Smith wasted no time getting to the docks to greet survivors of the HMS Titanic in 1912.

As a member of the Senate’s Commerce Committee, the Grand Rapids Republican boarded the survivor ships as they arrived into port.

He quickly subpoenaed the passengers and crew members for hearings he would chair to find out why the unsinkable ship sank in an ice field with too few lifeboats on board.

Smith, a Dowagiac native, had been a rags-to-riches story back home. After his father died when he was 12, his mother moved the family to Grand Rapids, where he became a newsboy for the Grand Rapids Herald.

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The ambitious Smith continued his education, got into politics, and got a law degree. He became Michigan’s first game warden in 1887 and served in the state Legislature.

He built railroads, bought banks and in 1906, bought the Grand Rapids Herald, where he hired a 22-year-old city hall reporter named Arthur H. Vandenberg, who also would later serve in the U.S. Senate.

After serving in the U.S. House for seven terms, the state legislature appointed Smith to the U.S. Senate in 1907 to replace U.S. Russell Alger, who had resigned. Smith became known in Congress as a fiercely protective of American commercial interests in international affairs.

According to the book, “Titanic; Triumph and Tragedy,” Smith had an axe to grind when he took on the Titanic hearings. “He was a vehement opponent of the Morgan interests – the very J.P. Morgan whose International Mercantile Marine owned the White Star Line, the Titanic’s operator.”

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The hearings got underway quickly so Smith could interview the British crew and survivors before they headed home. They began on April 19 – four days after the disaster – and concluded 17 days later.

Under sharp questioning by Smith, the committee heard compelling testimony from 82 witnesses, including 53 British subjects and 29 U.S. citizens.

Smith elicited testimony from ship officers who said there were no binoculars on the bridge that could have identified the ice field. He cross-examined ship officers to determine why there were not enough life boats and why some of their crews failed to rescue the survivors in the water.

The sharpest questions were reserved for J. Bruce Ismay, the British president of the Titanic’s parent company, who was aboard the ship and reportedly urged the ship’s crew to speed up.

Under questioning from Smith, Ismay admitted he hopped aboard a lifeboat early in the disaster and never looked back as the ship went down.

On May 29, Smith delivered a two-hour speech summarizing his 53-page report on the Senate floor.

Smith criticized the crew for speeding up in the ice field, failing to close off the ship’s watertight compartments and lowering the lifeboats “indifferently” so that 500 passengers were “needlessly sacrificed to the want of orderly discipline.”

While his findings were hailed by the American press, Smith became the object of scorn by the British media, which nicknamed him “Watertight Smith” and called his speech “a violent, unreasoning diatribe.”

Years later, the 1,145 pages of testimony and affidavits from Smith’s hearings were used as source material for books and the blockbuster movie, "Titanic."

After losing a bid for the presidency in 1916, Smith voluntarily resigned from the Senate in 1919 and returned to Grand Rapids. In 1932, he died of a heart attack at age 73.

E-mail Jim Harger: jharger@mlive.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/JHHarger