Dark Tide (24 page)
Authors: Stephen Puleo
By the time the terrible day had ended—a Wednesday that had begun with the buoyancy and high spirits that accompany a January thaw in New England—the death toll from the molasses flood had reached eleven; nine men, plus the widow Clougherty and little Maria Distasio. Another group of victims lay seriously injured and wracked with pain in the relief station, their fate hanging in the balance, largely dependent on their bodies’ ability to fight off infection.
There was also a third group: the missing. Had they been swept into the harbor? Crushed by tons of debris? Swallowed up and drowned by molasses, their bodies trapped in ooze, the chances of recovering them were impossible until cellars and freight sheds had been pumped out. As midnight approached, the cloyingly sweet smell of hardening molasses hung heavy in the Boston air, and the waterfront rats scurried across the wreckage, looking to taste and feed without becoming trapped. Rescuers tried to work, but the electric lighting was inadequate to illuminate the area. No real progress would be made until first light.
It would be then, too, that North End residents would witness the totality of the carnage on the waterfront.
News of historic proportions was on the verge of breaking on January 16, 1919, news that would change the economic and social face of America, and the world’s geopolitical landscape.
A Prohibition amendment to the U.S. Constitution, one that would ban the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, needed the approval of just one more state legislature for ratification. Thirty-five of the forty-eight states had ratified the soon-to-be enacted 18th amendment—one short of the three-fourths majority necessary for approval—only the sixth amendment to the Constitution since the Civil War and the first since 1913. Now the states of Nebraska, Minnesota, and Missouri were racing to become the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Prohibition amendment, a historic achievement that was expected within a day or two, perhaps within hours.
Half a world away, President Woodrow Wilson, who had made history by becoming the first American President to set foot on European soil while in office, was hoping to make it again outside of Paris at the famed chateau of Versailles. There, Wilson and the other “big four” leaders—British prime minister David Lloyd George, French premier Georges Clemenceau, and Italian prime minister Vittoria Orlando—were seeking to negotiate a peace treaty to end the Great War and prevent future wars. As part of the treaty, Wilson would put forth his “fourteen points,” aimed to prevent the secret alliances and treaties that had pulled the world into war in 1914. Further, in their efforts to build a lasting peace, Wilson and the other world leaders would craft, as part of the treaty, a blueprint for a new League of Nations, an unprecedented alliance of countries that would work together “to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security.”
Nonetheless, both Prohibition and the peace talks were dwarfed by the coverage Boston newspapers gave to the molasses disaster, emblazoning banner headlines and displaying large photos of the flood across their front pages and throughout their news sections, in their Thursday, January 16, editions.
“Huge Molasses Tank Explodes in North End; 11 Dead, 50 Hurt,” screamed the front page of the
Boston Post,
adding in a nightmarish subhead, “Giant Wave of 2.3 Million Gallons of Molasses, 50-feet High, Sweeps Everything Before It—100 Men, Women and Children Caught in Sticky Stream—Buildings, Vehicles, and ‘L’ Structure Crushed.” The
Boston Globe
countered with a banner headline, “Molasses Tank Explosion Injures 50 and Kills 11,” and a graphic subhead: “Scene of Ruin and Desolation in North End …” plus, “Death and Devastation in Wake of North End Disaster … Buildings Demolished, Sticky Mass Floods Streets.” The
Globe
let Boston residents know what happened in this report:
Fragments of the great tank were thrown into the air, buildings in the neighborhood began to crumple up as though the underpinnings had been pulled away from them, and scores of people in the various buildings were buried in the ruins, some dead and others badly injured.
The explosion came without the slightest warning. The workmen were at their noontime meal, some eating in the building or just outside … once the low, rumbling sound was heard no one had a chance to escape. The buildings seemed to cringe up as though they were made of pasteboard.
In its first-day report, the
Post
led with the following account:
A 50-foot wave of molasses—2,300,000 gallons of it—released in some manner yet unexplained, from a giant tank, swept over Commercial street and its waterfront from Charter street to the southerly end of North End park yesterday afternoon.
Ensnaring in its sticky flood more than 100 men, women, and children; crushing buildings, teams, automobiles, and street cars—everything in its path—the black, reeking mass slapped against the side of the buildings footing Copp’s Hill and then swished back toward the harbor.
Eleven persons—a woman, a girl, and nine men—were the known dead at midnight. More than 50 injured were in hospitals and at their homes. Some of them may die. Dead horses, cats, and dogs had been carted away in team after team.
Sailors at bottom left from the USS
Nantucket,
which was in port when the flood occurred, aided in the rescue efforts as crews cleared tons of debris to reach trapped victims.
(Photo courtesy of Bill Noonan, Boston Fire Department Archives)
In its inside pages, the
Post
described the destruction in the colorful newspaper language of the day:
A rumble, a hiss—some say a boom and a swish—and the wave of molasses swept out. It smote the huge steel girders of the “L” structure and bent, twisted, and snapped them, as if by the smash of a giant’s fist. Across the street, down the street, it rolled like a two-sided breaker at the seashore. Thirty feet high, it smashed against tenements on the edge of Copp’s Hill. Swirling back it sucked a modest frame dwelling [the Clougherty house] from where it nestled beside the three-story brick tenements and threw it, a mass of wreckage, under the “L” structure.
Then, balked by the staunch brick walls of the houses at the foot of the hill, the death-dealing mass swept back towards the water. Like eggshells it crushed the buildings of the North End yard of the city’s paving division … To the north it swirled and wiped out practically all of Boston’s only electric freight terminal. Big steel trolley freight cars were crushed as if eggshells, and their piled-up cargo of boxes and merchandise minced like so much sandwich meat.
The swath of destruction caused by the molasses wave extended for hundreds of feet down Commercial Street. Note the smashed vehicle against the stone wall at right. The mass of debris burying the Clougherty house can be seen in the center of the photo, beneath the trestle.
(Photo courtesy of Bill Noonan, Boston Fire Department Archives)
Meanwhile, the cause of the disaster continued to be a source of debate carried out in the press. State chemist Walter Wedger, and U.S. inspector of explosives Daniel T. O’Connell, believed strongly in the “collapse theory”—that the tank disintegrated because of a combination of structural weakness and fermentation inside the tank. USIA attorney Henry F.R. Dolan continued to argue “beyond question” that outside influences, “evilly disposed persons,” were responsible for destroying the tank, insisting that the fifty-foot receptacle was structurally sound.
As the clean-up continued—as workers first tried to remove hardening molasses with chisels and saws, and finally used millions of gallons of briny seawater to cut the congealing liquid; as the injured were ministered at the relief station and the search continued for additional victims amidst the debris on the waterfront—Boston newspapers, and even the
New York Times
, continued to carry reports of the disaster on their front pages. They listed the names, ages, and occupations of the dead and the injured. They ran sidebars of people who escaped the wave by ducking under railroad cars. They published small stories explaining that people who were feared lost were actually alive and well.
For a week after the flood, the molasses tragedy became the
only
news in Boston, the talk of the city, the focus of activity in the North End.
Meanwhile, rescue teams kept searching for bodies.
While clean-up and recovery efforts were continuing, church bells throughout Boston pealed in celebration. Nebraska had just become the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Prohibition amendment, providing the three-fourths total necessary to amend the U.S. Constitution; after a one-year grace period, the actual law banning alcohol in the United States would go into effect on January 17, 1920.
It no longer mattered to U.S. Industrial Alcohol. Its 2.3 million gallons of molasses covered Commercial Street and filled the basements of homes and businesses in the area. Its attempt to convert its molasses distillation process from industrial alcohol for munitions to grain alcohol for rum—its attempt, in effect, to outrun the oncoming Prohibition amendment—had ended in disaster.
USIA’s days in Boston were numbered.
Two days after the disaster, with the water of Boston Harbor stained brown from the molasses that had been washed into it, more than three hundred workers covered the waterfront, combing through wreckage for the bodies of the missing, clearing debris so the search could proceed more smoothly, and wielding acetylene torches to cut the steel pieces of the tank into manageable sizes that could be carried away. The city provided about 125 of those workers, Boston Elevated another hundred, and the Hugh Nawn Construction Company, builders of the tank’s foundation, supplied another hundred. United States Industrial Alcohol had supplied no workers and, indeed, its first representatives had not visited the scene until Friday, when Vice President M.C. Whittaker arrived from New York, engineers William F. Cochrane and John F. Barnard traveled north from Baltimore, and treasurer Arthur P. Jell made his way over from USIA’s East Cambridge distilling plant.
Whittaker and his men met with Thomas F. Sullivan, commissioner of Public Works for Boston, and a heated argument ensued that could be heard outside the building in which they met. Sullivan angrily disapproved of the fact that USIA had delayed so long before sending representatives to the scene, and was providing no clean-up assistance. Whittaker finally agreed to hire up to 150 men to assist with the clean-up. In addition, engineers Cochrane and Barnard would supervise the removal of the steel tank pieces to a scrap metal yard in Roxbury, a few miles away. The pieces would either be transported by wagon if they could fit, or for larger sections, dragged by teams of horses fitted with ropes and harnesses. Arthur P. Jell remained on the waterfront for several hours that day, but there is no evidence that he contributed to the discussion during the meeting.
After the brief exchange between the city and USIA officials, a member of the press cornered Whittaker outside.
“Can you give some cause for the accident?” the reporter asked.
“No. If I could, I wouldn’t have to work for a living,” Whittaker snapped back.
