Dark Tide (34 page)

Josephat C. Blain fidgeted on the witness stand, a nervous clerk who worked in the Boston Building Department, and whose boss approved the plans for the foundation of the molasses tank that Hammond Iron Works had submitted in October 1915. Because the tank was considered a “receptacle” and not a “building,” Hammond was not required to seek a separate permit nor include the certification of an engineer to build the fifty-foot steel tank itself. However, Blain pointed out, Hammond
did
submit specifications for the tank as part of its foundation permit.

Under Damon Hall’s questioning, Blain confirmed that the plans called for specific thickness of each of the seven plates that Hammond used to construct the tank—ring one was to be .687 inches thick, ring two was .625 inches thick, all the way to ring seven at the top of the tank, where the plans stated that the ring measured .312 inches in thickness. It was according to these specifications that the city issued the permit for the foundation and the tank.

Hall then read in open court Hammond’s answers to questions regarding the thickness of the walls of the tank. Hammond’s sworn statement showed that the thickness of every plate was less than what was called for in the plans. For example, the plans showed ring one—the bottom plate—would be .687 inches thick, but Hammond delivered a plate that was .667 inches thick. Plans called for the top plate, ring seven, to be .312 inches thick; Hammond delivered a steel plate that was .284 inches thick.

Hall said: “In every single one of those rings, this reputable Hammond Iron Works [delivered steel plates] that were less than the specifications called for … they were like all other steel manufacturers in the country, hurrying to fill war orders, and in every instance, they furnished steel less than the specs called for.”

USIA lawyer Charles Choate claimed that the differences were not large enough to be a factor, and that there was a “recognized custom of tolerance” in accordance with guidelines set forth by the American Society for Testing Materials. “No inspector would be warranted in rejecting a plate if it came within the above-mentioned tolerances,” Choate argued.

Hall scoffed: “Your Honor, how long would an argument of that kind last before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court? If a street car operator says, ‘I ordered axles that were sufficient to carry my car and not break, but there is a rule among car builders that they can furnish something less than I ordered and I accepted the axles under this rule. True, they are not what I ordered, and true, they are too light, but that is a rule that carbuilders follow.’ How long would the Supreme Court take to consider a defense of that kind? That is what this whole tolerance question comes down to.”

Hall had shown that the walls of the tank were up to 10 percent thinner, and thus, by definition, weaker, and less able to withstand pressure, than Hammond Iron Works had stated in the plans it had filed with the Boston Building Department.

Or put another way, the steel manufacturer had lied to the city.

Charles Choate continued to plead that the difference in thickness was so small that there would be no discernible difference in strength, and perhaps technically, he was correct. But in the battle for credibility, Hall had scored another victory.

Hall then called his “average” witnesses, who testified to the actual condition of the tank, the natural result, as Hall framed his questions, of a giant steel structure that was rushed to completion and built below specifications. The North End waterfront tank was flawed from the beginning, the plaintiffs argued, and remained flawed for the entire time it stood.

First, Frances Brown, a clerk for the Bay State Railway at the time of the flood, whose second-story office window was right across from the tank, said she noticed “several times, that molasses flowed down the sides of the tank … at the time when the molasses boat would come in, around that time, before or after, I would notice it oozing out,” Brown said. “I would notice it and call it to the attention of the girls [in the office]; in fact, we all noticed it. Several times, I saw it on the ground.”

William Foster, a marine engineer on fireboat 31, concurred, asserting: “The tank always leaked after it was put up. I noticed some of the vertical seams; the bottom ones leaked pretty badly. From the top, you could also see the molasses dripping out and running down the sides of the tank.” And then, Foster’s unmistakable implication that USIA had attempted to literally cover up the leaking problem: “The tank kept leaking right up to the time of the collapse, but you could not notice it so much at the last, because they repainted the tank … it was kind of a dark reddish brown and you couldn’t see the molasses as clearly.”

Philip Lydon, a stevedore for the Revere Sugar Refinery who worked at the North End Paving Yard from 1916 to 1918, said when molasses ships pulled into port, he and several other men would go to the tank and watch. Before a fence was erected around the tank, prior to America’s entrance into the war, Lydon said he leaned against the tank frequently while crews pumped molasses into the steel structure. “We could feel it, the vibration, bulging in and out,” Lydon said. “There was always a big leak, too, near the junction of the second and third plates … molasses ran down the side of the tank, enough for the children in the neighborhood to be there every day to get a dose of it. They would be there from early morning till late at night.”

While Charles Choate chided Lydon for “leaning” against the tank during working hours (“I have seen workmen do that when they were working for the city, but I didn’t know they had to have a tank to hold them up.”), he couldn’t shake Lydon’s testimony about the leaks. Nor did he endear himself to the witness with the snide comment about slacking: “The only time I used to go there [to the tank] was at meal hours,” Lydon shot back.

Hall’s next witness, paving yard night watchman Henry Minard, corroborated those who came before him. “I noticed that all summer before the accident, it leaked,” Minard said of the tank. “I noticed that boys used to come down there with small cans and hold them under the seams … more on a hot day than on a cool day.”

On cross-examination, Choate succeeded in getting Minard to acknowledge that, occasionally, “bums looking for a place to sleep” would enter the waterfront area through a small gate “that was never locked, on account of the firehouse being down there … but if I saw them, I would throw them out.” Minard also admitted that others “who didn’t belong” were often in the waterfront area, but Choate’s focus on possible “evilly disposed persons” did not disguise the fact that he chose
not
to address the leaking issue in his cross.

Hall’s next two witnesses went beyond the leaks in their description of the tank. Charles Caffrey, a stableman at the paving yard when the accident occurred, confirmed that the leaks were constant and that children “used sticks and cans to get molasses.” But he also said he “frequently” heard sounds from within the tank, “sounds like thunder, like rumbling … I heard it most any time I was near the tank.” Unfortunately for Choate and USIA, under cross-examination, Caffrey went further:

Choate:
Didn’t you think the noise could be the sound of freight cars, or street cars, or the elevated trains?

Caffrey:
Well, no, not exactly. It was more of a roll, like thunder.

Choate:
When you first heard it, did you think it was a thunderstorm?

Caffrey:
I didn’t, because I knew what it was.

Choate:
What was it?

Caffrey:
It was something inside of the molasses tank, bubbling and rolling, something you could hear roll heavily. I think the molasses must have been boiling, or doing something.

Choate:
You think it was the boiling of the molasses that made a roar like thunder?

Caffrey:
Yes.

Damon Hall, who must have been gleeful about Caffrey uttering the phrase “boiling molasses” during Choate’s cross, finished his string of “disinterested” witnesses by calling firefighter Stephen O’Brien to the stand. O’Brien, a twenty-year veteran of the Boston Fire Department, had worked at the Engine 31 fireboat as a marine engineer from 1911 until the day of the disaster, though he was not on duty on January 15, 1919.

But O’Brien
was
at the waterfront many days during Hammond’s construction of the tank, and his engineering curiosity drew him frequently to the work site. It was his observations about the nature of the construction that Hall focused on during questioning:

Hall:
Tell us, Mr. O’Brien, how you saw them putting in the rivets, and what you saw them do before they put the rivets into the plates.

O’Brien:
I saw them drift two holes in, holes that didn’t match up.

Hall:
What do you mean by “drift”?

O’Brien:
Well, the two holes would come about an eighth of an inch from being fair, from matching up. So they put what we call a drift pin in—a steel instrument about ten or fifteen inches long, tapered at the end to the size of the hole—and gave it two or three cracks with a sledge hammer. Then they pull out the drift pin and put the rivets in.

Hall:
Well, how many times have you seen this, when one hole didn’t match up with the second hole?

O’Brien:
I couldn’t tell just how many times. They worked day and night.

Charles Choate attempted unsuccessfully to shake Hall’s witness, growing frustrated with O’Brien’s insistence that he could see the misaligned plate-holes even from a distance. “You have got very good eyesight, haven’t you?” Choate asked.

“Well, I never wore glasses,” O’Brien said.

“Perhaps you’d better,” Choate snapped, and dismissed O’Brien.

Damon Hall could not have asked for a better performance from his “no name” witnesses. Each of them had been articulate, unwavering in their testimony, and most importantly, credible.

With the foundation established, Hall called Isaac Gonzales, and the two caulkers, Patrick Kenneally and John Urquhart, to strengthen his case about the tank’s substandard construction. Kenneally and Urquhart described how they tried to stem the sheer number of leaks. Gonzales told of the scale-flakes from the tank’s inside walls raining down on him, his unsuccessful attempts to convince Jell that the tank was in danger of falling, and his own observations of the leaks. “It leaked enough to make a pool, about a pail of molasses in twenty-four hours,” Gonzales testified. “The leaks were principally in the horizontal seams but in the vertical ones, too. I would spread enough sand to keep the molasses from flowing onto the railcar tracks. There was no place that I could say it was not leaking.”

After establishing for Ogden the physical condition of the tank, Hall called as witnesses five men who described themselves as explosives experts. They were sailors stationed on ships in Boston Harbor when the tank collapsed. All had served as ordnance machinists and detonation workers during the war; they were men who, like Hugh Ogden, had seen combat in Europe and were all too familiar with the sound of a shell screaming toward the ground and the pounding, deafening blast afterward. They testified that when the tank collapsed they heard rumbling sounds like thunder, or tearing sounds like rending wood, or sounds like a building collapsing.

But each of these dynamite and TNT experts were adamant that the sound they heard was
nothing
like the thunder produced by a high explosive.

None of the experiments USIA conducted to prove that a bomb had destroyed the tank, none of the professors and academicians who testified about the angle of the blast in the replica tank, could match the simple veracity of these combat-tested men who were a few feet from the tank when it collapsed.

USIA’s anarchist defense, built on testimony from paid experts—its
theory
, as Hall disdainfully labeled it—thus far had been shredded by solid testimony from average citizens who knew what they saw and described it in no uncertain words. It wasn’t over yet, but USIA was reeling; the plaintiffs needed just one knockout punch to end the fight. Damon Hall knew this and so did Charles Choate.

It was why Hall wanted nothing more than to question Arthur P. Jell, and Choate wanted just as badly to keep USIA’s assistant treasurer off the stand.

When Republican Warren G. Harding rode in a Packard Twin Six from the White House to the Capitol on the morning of March 4, 1921, he became the first president to arrive at his inauguration in an automobile instead of a horse-drawn carriage. This symbolized both the dramatic political change that had taken place in the country with Harding’s election, and the beginning of a new era of innovation, commerce, and prosperity in America, led by Big Business.

Proving the pundits correct, Harding and his vice-presidential running mate, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, had swept into office in November, burying their Democratic opponent, Ohio Governor James M. Cox. Harding collected 404 electoral votes and won thirty-seven states, compared with Cox’s 127 electoral votes and eleven states. The popular vote margin was even more impressive—61 percent to 35 percent (Socialist Eugene V. Debs garnered 3 percent of the popular vote).