Dark Tide (26 page)

Meanwhile, workers continued the massive recovery and clean-up effort. Police and firefighters, city workers and sailors, laborers and volunteers continued to haul away wreckage, claw through debris, operate hydraulic pumps, remove ruined goods from Commercial Street cellars, and man seawater-shooting fire hoses to cut congealed molasses. The disaster also was spreading, literally, as molasses was tracked across the city by rescue workers and onlookers when they returned home; molasses covered subway platforms and seats inside the trains and trolleys, stuck to the handsets of pay telephones, and floated in the water-troughs around the city where horses would stop for a drink.

But as bad as the situation was, rescue crews were already expressing their thanks that the tragedy had not happened in summer. In the warm weather, when school was out, there would have been twenty-five to thirty children playing in the North End Park, all of whom would have been drowned by the wall of molasses. And in the summer, the health risks from pests and rodents would have been as devastating as the flood itself; rats by the hundreds and flies by the
millions
would have descended upon the waterfront, attracted by thick, sweet liquid that spread across the wharf and Commercial Street. Insects were scarce in late January, but the rats were still a nuisance—in warm weather, their sheer numbers would have made them unstoppable.

As rescue workers pondered the unthinkable scene around them, as they sullenly shook their heads when Josie Nicolo asked about her missing husband, as they wondered whether the waterfront would ever return to normal, most of them had one question uppermost in their minds:

How could this have happened?

NINE

Bostonians must have been bewildered, even angry, when they picked up their morning newspapers on Saturday, February 8, 1919, less than a month after the molasses tank collapsed, and read that a seething Judge Wilfred Bolster was blaming
them
for the disaster.

Not only them. He chided the Boston Building Department for its cursory examination of USIA’s plans to construct the tank and for the “incompetent” people who reviewed those plans. He scolded USIA and Arthur P. Jell for failing to verify the tank’s safety and relying solely on the assurance of the manufacturer.

But in his inquest report filed in the office of the clerk of the Superior Criminal Court, Bolster blasted the public for its failure both to adequately fund its city inspection departments and to insist on qualified people to staff them. “The chief blame rests upon the public itself,” Bolster declared. “This single accident has cost more in material damage alone than all the supposed economics in the building department. Laws are cheap of passage, costly of enforcement. They do not execute themselves. A public which, with one eye on the tax rate, provides itself with an administrative equipment 50 percent qualified, has no right to complain that it does not get a 100 percent product—and so far as it accepts political influence as the equivalent of scientific positions which demand such attainment in a high degree, so long it must expect breakdowns in its machinery.”

Still, Bolster acknowledged that the public’s “error of judgment” was not negligence, and that the only party that could be held criminally responsible for the tank disaster was U.S. Industrial Alcohol. “The only assignable crime involved is manslaughter, through negligence,” Bolster said. “My conclusion from all this evidence is that this tank was wholly insufficient in point of structural strength to handle its load, insufficient to meet either legal or engineering requirements. This structure being maintained in violation of the law, the lessee has incurred the penalty which is absolute. I have therefore ordered process against the United States Industrial Alcohol Company.”

Based on Bolster’s inquest report, District Attorney Joseph Pelletier presented evidence to a grand jury the following week. “The evidence tends to show that the huge tank collapsed by reason of faulty construction and not because of an explosion,” he said.

Five days after hearing the evidence that Pelletier presented, the grand jury issued its report. It agreed that the structure did not comply with the law, and that the building department gave USIA authority to put up the structure in a way “not permitted by the law.”

In addition: “The Grand Jury concurs with the expression of Chief Justice Bolster that no matter of expense of qualified employees should deter the city from making a most thorough examination of all plans and materials submitted before issuing a permit.”

However, on the larger issue of criminal negligence, the grand jury ruled that there was insufficient evidence to justify, or return, an indictment for manslaughter. There would be no criminal charges brought against anyone in the molasses flood case.

Two days later, on February 14, MIT professor C.M. Spofford, who had been hired by Boston Elevated to examine and test pieces of the tank, reported that the steel plates were of “insufficient thickness” to withstand the pressure of molasses, and that there were not enough rivets to fasten the tank sufficiently. “In my judgment, the tank was improperly designed and its failure was due entirely to structural weakness,” Spofford stated in his report. “The stresses due to the static pressure of the molasses alone were so great that the whole structure was in a dangerous condition.”

USIA dismissed the assertions of Bolster, Pelletier, and Spofford, and instead was heartened and emboldened by the grand jury’s failure to issue indictments. In a brief statement, its last until civil proceedings began in 1920, the company reiterated its belief that evilly disposed persons had used dynamite to blow up the tank, and that USIA bore no responsibility for the disaster.

The Boston molasses disaster was the first in a series of events that disrupted the equilibrium of the city and the country in 1919, events that generated first uneasiness, and then fear and disillusionment, across the land. The euphoria that had accompanied the armistice in November 1918 had dissipated, and Bostonians and Americans struggled to make sense of a nation that seemed to be spinning out of control in February and March of the new year.

It was a year that began with returning soldiers and sailors flooding the civilian labor market even as government war production contracts were being canceled. In addition, with the wartime shortage of labor in 1917 and 1918, blacks from the South had migrated to northern industrial cities seeking jobs, a practice they continued after the war ended. Now, blacks, whites, and returning veterans were battling for fewer jobs, all in the midst of rising prices and a soaring cost of living.

As a result, labor unrest was sweeping industry and government from coast to coast. In Massachusetts, a violent strike erupted in the textile mills of nearby Lawrence, and soon after, more than twelve thousand telephone workers employed by the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company walked off their jobs. Both groups were seeking higher wages, a forty-eight-hour workweek, and stronger collective bargaining rights. The telephone operators, who earned $16 per week, demanded $22, and finally settled for $19 after a one-week strike. Despite its short duration, the strike alarmed and disrupted the business community—it was an ominous sign of discontent among American workers.

There were more. Boston Police, who were beginning their contract negotiations with the city, rejected a $100 annual raise, and also rejected a compromise $140 raise (10 percent), adopting the slogan, “$200 or nothing.”

Elsewhere, thirty-five thousand dressmakers in New York struck for a forty-four-hour week and a 15 percent pay increase, and more than sixty thousand workers struck in Seattle, bringing the seaport city to a standstill. This “general strike,” the notion that a city could be paralyzed by work stoppages, made Americans uneasy, even more so when a labor newspaper in Seattle editorialized, “We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by Labor in the country … We are starting on a road that leads—no one knows where.”

Historian Francis Russell noted that inadequate working conditions and rising prices both frightened and galvanized workers. “Wherever one turned, in industry or transportation or public service, there seemed to be a strike or threatened strike,” he said. “To add to the malaise, prices, instead of falling, continued to rise. The value of the 1914 dollar had dropped to only forty-five cents. Food costs had gone up 84 percent, clothes, 114 percent. For the average American family, the cost of living was double what it had been five years earlier, and income had lagged behind. Professional classes, from clergymen and professors to clerks, state and city employees, firemen and police, found themselves worse off than at any time since the Civil War.”

The uncertainty bred by these woeful economic conditions, coupled with the strikes and threatened work stoppages, focused the public’s attention on—and fueled its fear of—domestic radicals such as Socialists, IWW, and anarchists, who were often blamed for the social unrest. In mid-February, the Bureau of Immigration deported between seven thousand and eight thousand aliens “as rapidly as they can be rounded up and put on ships.” The mayor of Seattle, Ole Hanson, toured the country following the strike in his city, warning of the Red menace in the United States. A Lawrence, Massachusetts, Citizens’ Committee announced plans to “wage war on Bolshevism” and root out labor agitators. A radical labor leader was arrested in Cleveland in connection with a conspiracy to kill President Wilson.

The domestic tension affected international diplomacy as well. President Wilson, fresh off successful negotiations in Paris for both the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, faced strong opposition on the League from Republicans in the Senate, led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. GOP senators believed that the League would jeopardize American sovereignty and become “an impediment to the independence of this country.” Lodge and other Republican senators wanted the Treaty and the League of Nations severed in their ratification discussions; President Wilson believed that they were inextricably linked.

Wilson decided to make Boston the first American city that he would visit following the Versailles peace conference, and sailed from Paris in mid-February. It would be his first visit to Boston as president, and his goal was to speak directly to the people to promote the League in the state in which the leading Republican, Lodge, had been its staunchest and most vociferous opponent.

The day before Wilson’s arrival, Secret Service agents and members of the New York Police Department arrested fourteen Spanish anarchists in Manhattan and charged them with conspiracy to assassinate the president. Acting on an anonymous tip, the agents raided a Lexington Avenue home, expecting to find loaded bombs that the anarchists were planning to set off in Boston. Neither bombs nor explosives were found, and the anarchists were not carrying firearms, but agents said they found documentary evidence that proved that radicals had planned to kill the president using dynamite.

While Wilson’s ship, the
George Washington
, was at sea, an anarchist shot and wounded French premier Georges Clemenceau in Paris. One of the three shots that struck him pierced a lung, but Clemenceau later recovered.