Dark Tide (13 page)

The formation of the Rainbow Division had been the vision of a stern and feisty colonel named Douglas MacArthur. Amid the rush by America to mobilize, individual states had competed with each other for the honor to be the first to send their National Guard units to fight overseas. To minimize the negative implications of this competition, the Army decided to create a division composed of hand-picked National Guard units from twenty-six states and the District of Columbia. Thus, the 42nd was born, “a division that stretches like a Rainbow from one end of America to the other,” in the words of MacArthur—and the nickname had stuck. The 42nd had arrived in France in November 1917, and was scheduled to enter front-line fighting in March 1918.

Ogden’s service with the Rainbow Division would continue through the end of the war, through the division’s 175 consecutive days of virtually face-to-face combat with the enemy, through its courageous participation in the Luneville, Baccarat, Champagne-Marne, Aisne-Marne, Chateau-Thierry, Saint-Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne offensives. He would be promoted to lieutenant colonel in September 1918, and would be cited for “high ability and talents and valuable services” while with the division. When the war ended in November of that year, he would serve with the American Army of Occupation in Germany as a legal adviser. In 1919, he would be asked by the Army to serve on a committee investigating court martial procedures and articles of war.

After the war, Hugh W. Ogden would receive the Distinguished Service Medal of the United States, and years later, the decoration of the Officer of the Legion of Honor of the French government, honors he certainly could not have predicted in early 1918 when the outcome of the Great War was still in doubt.

Nor could he have predicted today—sitting at his desk in France and sealing the letter to his dear friend, Lippincott—that shortly after his return to Boston, he would preside over one of the country’s most celebrated civil lawsuits, stemming from one of the most unusual disasters in United States history.

As war raged in Europe’s muddy trenches, tensions smoldered at home between U.S. government authorities and anarchists. On February 22, a team of federal agents and local police again raided the office of the anarchist newspaper,
Cronaca Sovversiva
, in Lynn, Massachusetts. They seized thousands of documents, including a photograph of Bartolomeo Vanzetti with Luigi Galleani, and a mailing list of about three thousand names, including those of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Based on these raids, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Immigration issued about a hundred arrest warrants for Galleanists considered “liable for deportation.” Nearly half of these lived in New England, mainly in the Boston area. Many of them were among the most active in the anarchist movement, and either wrote for
Cronaca
or raised money for the cause. Anthony Caminetti, the commissioner general of immigration in Washington, D.C., ordered Boston immigration commissioner H.J. Skeffington to take aliens into custody and to hold hearings aimed “to establish their anarchist views and activities.” Immigration officials and local police carried out the arrests throughout the region. Luigi Galleani himself was arrested in May, but released after he was questioned extensively. He would remain free for nine more months.

On July 18, 1918, authorities finally outlawed
Cronaca Sovversina
, on the grounds that it was subversive, undermined the American war effort, and in the words of the Justice Department, was “the most dangerous newspaper published in this country.”

Anarchists in the North End simmered at the decision.

Nearly 5 million men served in the United States Armed Forces during the First World War, about five in one hundred citizens, but it was not until the major German offensive in March 1918 that America made its supreme contribution to the Allied effort, transporting 1.5 million soldiers to France within a six-month period. Of the more than 2 million men who reached France, 1.4 million of them saw active service on the front line.

The munitions industry kept pace. They supplied American forces with the ammunition, high explosives, and smokeless powder that the troops needed to fight and win on foreign soil, and provided employment in the United States for those whose efforts supplied the soldiers overseas. Between April 1917 and November 1918, more than 632 million pounds of smokeless powder was produced in the United States, equal to the combined production of England and France. As for high explosives—TNT, ammonium nitrate, picric acid and others—U.S. production was more than 40 percent larger than England’s and nearly double that of France for all of 1918. One expert pointed out that the remarkable success of America’s munitions production effort was best illustrated by the fact that “the artillery ammunition program was never held up for lack of either the powder which hurls the bullet or shell from the gun, or the high explosive which makes the shell effective when it reaches its destination.” As they had since 1915, the companies that produced munitions continued to reap unprecedented profits during 1917 and 1918.

Their suppliers did, too. USIA manufactured the industrial alcohol that was used in the production of fulminate of mercury, acetone, and cordite—critical components of high explosives and smokeless powders. The company continued to distill enormous quantities of molasses to produce the alcohol at its Cambridge plant. The Commercial Street molasses tank on the Boston waterfront reached the 2 million-gallon level
seven
times during 1918, beginning in March and continuing through December.

As a result, Isaac Gonzales worked harder during the spring and summer of 1918 than he ever had, but his exhaustion had less to do with the manual labor he performed at the tank during the day than it did with the stress and physical exertion he subjected himself to at night. For even as the big molasses steamers arrived from Cuba and the islands to unload their millions of gallons of cargo, the Commercial Street tank still leaked, and Isaac was despondent.

When July rolled around and the heat had baked into Boston’s streets and buildings, Isaac had begun his cross-city runs in the wee hours of the morning to check on the condition of the tank and make sure that it was still standing. At 2
A.M.
, at 2:30
A.M.
—he never left the house later than 3
A.M.
, lest he linger too long at the tank and be spied returning home by puzzled neighbors who arose at first light. On the night of each of these runs, he had left his wife, concerned about him but also contemptuous, lying frustrated in the darkness of their tiny bedroom. Isaac knew of her feelings, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to check the tank.

During the day, the grueling work pace kept him from obsessing about the tank’s collapse. Helping to unload the molasses steamers, climbing into the tank to clear the outflow pipe, bolting the tank’s hose assembly to the flange atop the railroad cars—these tasks were enough to keep his mind and body occupied.

The torrid heat wave was also a distraction. The last week in July was the hottest on record in Boston, with temperatures climbing to the high 90s. Four people had died in the heat wave and several others were treated for heat exhaustion. Another death occurred the first week in August. Although some industrial plants had mechanical cooling systems for specific processes during this period, it would be several years before Willis Haviland Carrier, the “father of air conditioning,” would improve his product to the point where it could cool large buildings. Thus, Boston workers removed their ties and left their sweltering offices in droves by midday and headed to Revere Beach on the North Shore and Nantasket Beach on the South Shore. Firefighters flushed the streets by opening hydrants during the day, and Boston mayor Andrew Peters (who defeated Curley in December 1917) ordered that the “lightless nights” policy that had been implemented citywide to conserve energy during the war would not apply to Boston’s parks.

During these uncomfortable nights, most people in the city’s crowded neighborhoods abandoned attempts to sleep indoors, and in places like the North End, carried bedding to the tenement rooftops or fire escapes to find relief. Isaac had heard their nocturnal noises as he ran through the North End streets—a cough here, a sneeze there—and had been gripped by an irrational fear that they would try to stop him if they had awakened. Yet no one had ever called out to him.

The intense heat and work pace helped distract Isaac’s thoughts about the condition of the molasses tank, but never for very long. When he took a water break, or paused to wipe the sweat from his eyes with the back of his sticky hand, the tank filled his field of vision, and the molasses leaking from its seams looked like a series of brown waterfalls.

Isaac was not alone in noticing the leaks. Many days he had chased the little Italian children who lived across the street off the property—Maria, her brother Tony, and their friend, the one they called Pasqualeno—though usually not before they had filled their pails with molasses. The firefighters talked about it in the early morning when they gathered outside the firehouse and prepared to launch their boat to patrol the harbor, their anxious voices carrying across the wharf on the warm, dawn air, before the roar of the elevated railroad trains and the clatter of horse-drawn wagons began in earnest. A stableman for the City of Boston Paving Department asked Isaac what was going on inside the tank. “Sounds like the molasses is bubbling or boiling, or doing something,” he had said. Another worker told Isaac that he liked to lean up against the tank to feel the vibration against his back. “It’s a regular vibration, as though the tank is bulging in and out.”

In some ways, Isaac felt heartened by these comments; they proved that other people saw what he saw, that he wasn’t overreacting or, worse, losing his mind. In other ways, the remarks frightened him and heightened his fear and uncertainty. If the leaks were clear enough for others to see, why didn’t his company do something? What if the tank collapsed? What if someone bombed it? Wasn’t the tank more vulnerable to dynamite if it was structurally weak to begin with? Why did Mr. Jell and Mr. White ignore his warnings? White, as superintendent, was at the tank site every day. He saw the children with their pails, heard the firefighters and the city workers talking. He knew the leaks were excessive, yet he remained silent and ordered Isaac to do the same.

Fine. Isaac would remain silent, but he had told White about his late-night crosstown runs, relished the telling, in fact. He had wanted White to know how strongly he felt, all but
dared
White to stop him. The tank superintendent had merely grunted and turned away. The question now was: What would White do about it? If he had meant to fire Isaac, he would have done so on the spot. That had not happened. Throughout July, Isaac waited to see if his pleas about the tank would be heeded or ignored; he waited to see if his bosses would take action.

In early August, Isaac got his answer. One morning, on orders from Mr. Jell, a crew arrived and spent the next two days painting the tank, covering its steel-gray shell with a rust-brown color. Isaac and everyone else on the waterfront noticed right away that it became more difficult to see the thick molasses streaming down the sides of the tank.

The sticky liquid now blended, chameleon-like, with the fresh coat of paint, indiscernible from the tank’s wall, dropping toward the ground invisibly and silently, like a thief in the night.

Isaac had seen enough. He had warned his superiors about the tank’s condition, and they had responded with a paint job. They thought they could
hide
the danger. On September 1, 1918, insulted and distraught, his heart heavy, his nerves raw, worried about his own sanity and in despair over the future of his marriage, Isaac quit his job with United States Industrial Alcohol and enlisted in the United States Army. He was assigned to the 13th Battalion, 50th Company and sent to Columbus, Ohio, for training. Isaac did not know it, but the war would be over before he could be transferred overseas and he would spend his full seven months of service in Columbus.

He also didn’t know—though perhaps his nocturnal premonitions had continued even as he sought sleep in his bunk—that when he returned to Boston in March 1919, the Commercial Street wharf area would be changed forever.

Early on the morning of November 11, 1918, before Boston firefighter George Layhe boarded the ferry in East Boston to take him across the harbor to the Engine 31 station; before Giuseppe Iantosca left his Charter Street home to begin another grueling day with a pick and shovel; before Bridget Clougherty had finished cleaning the breakfast dishes in her Commercial Street house, while her son, Martin, slept upstairs—before all of this—Boston newspapers were already proclaiming with jubilant headlines that the armistice had been signed. The war in Europe was over.

“Whole World in Delirium of Joy,” shouted the
Boston Globe
on its front page, and its editorial effused, “it is victory, victory at last. The old day is over, its long, dreadful night of war is past. A new day dawns.” Church bells and fire bells rang out across the city and in the suburbs. Historian Francis Russell describes the day this way: “The downtown air quivered from the shrillness of the tugboat whistles and the foghorn in the harbor. For Boston, as for all the other thronged and delirious cities, that morning was the beginning of the new, the bright promise of a future that combined the ineradicable American belief in progress with the memory of a prewar golden past that never existed but was now to be recaptured.” The day was climaxed by an impromptu victory parade featuring an effigy of the Kaiser carried on a stretcher by Haymarket Square workers and led by Mayor Peters.