Had the Little case or the Jenkins case been tried in Johnstown instead of Pittsburgh, it is possible that the decisions would have gone the other way, though in Johnstown there would have been small chance of finding twelve men to serve on a jury who would have been able to profess no bias against the club. In the judgment of lawyers who have examined the facts of the disaster in recent years, it also seems likely that had the damage cases been conducted according to today’s standards the club and several of its members would have lost. It is even conceivable that some of those immense Pittsburgh fortunes would have been reduced to almost nothing. What the repercussions of that might have been is interesting to speculate. Possibly it would have delayed, perhaps even altered significantly, the nation’s industrial growth.
In trying to evaluate why the cases went as they did, it is, of course, important to keep in mind the tremendous power of the people who were being sued. Their influence and prestige were such that few would have ever dared challenge them on anything. “It is almost impossible to imagine how those people were feared,” Victor Heiser would say many years later. They were the ruling class. It was that simple. The papers could rail away to their heart’s delight (while seldom ever mentioning any names), but to actually strike out at the likes of the clubmen, even within the confines of the courts, was something else again. Practically speaking, the odds against winning against them were enormous, even had the cases been open and shut, which they were not.
For to prove that any living member of the club had been personally negligent would have been extremely difficult. And in all fairness, it is quite likely, as the Boston Post suggested, that the clubmen themselves knew no more about the structural character of the dam than did anyone in Johnstown. Like nearly every leading citizen of Johnstown, with the exceptions of Morrell and Fulton, they made the mistake of assuming that the men who had rebuilt the dam had known what they were doing.
They had been told that the dam was properly engineered and properly maintained, and so, as long as everything went all right, they had no cause to think otherwise.
In addition, there is no doubt that the storm which brought on the failure of the dam was without precedent; or at least that during the relatively short period of time in which there had been some semblance of civilization in the area (which was less than a hundred years), no one had recorded a heavier downpour. So for such skillful lawyers as Knox and Reed to have argued that the whole dreadful occurrence was an act of God would have been very easy, and judging by the outcome, they made their point with great effect.
Certainly in the eyewitness testimony collected by the Pennsylvania Railroad in preparation for the suits it might have to face, repeated emphasis was placed on proving that no one had ever seen such a storm; and therefore if the “reasonable precautions” taken by railroad employees such as yardmaster Walkinshaw had turned out badly, it was only because the storm itself was so very unnatural. (It is also interesting to note that Pitcairn, in defense of Ruff’s abilities, agreed openly that Ruff had no engineering training; Ruff was a lot better than any engineer, Pitcairn said.)
Still the heart of the matter remained the dam itself, and judging from occasional comments that appeared in the papers, it seems that the club’s defense was based on the proposition that the dam would have broken anyway—even if it had had no structural flaws.
Apparently that was a convincing argument, despite the fact that several small dams which had been built near Johnstown to supply the city’s drinking water had not failed as a result of the storm; and these, significantly enough, had been built under the personal supervision of Daniel J. Morrell.
The water in Lake Conemaugh, the attorneys for the defense must have claimed, was coming up so fast on the afternoon of the 31st, and would have continued to come up so fast, even had the dam held past 3:10, that eventually it would have started over the top, and once that happened, sooner or later, the best of earth dams would have failed. Even had there been no sag at the center, even if the spillway had been working to full capacity, the volume of water rushing into the lake was greater than what could get out, and so, they held, the end result would have been the same, except that it would have come later, and perhaps at night when the consequences would have been far more disastrous. It was a specious line of defense, for several reasons.
First of all, there is no way of ascertaining for certain whether the inflow of water was such that it would have caused the lake to spill over the breast of the dam for an extended period of time had the dam been higher at the center, instead of lower, and had there been no obstructions in the spillway. There is also no way of telling whether there was a drop off in the volume of water pouring into the lake in the hours following the break. In other words, would there have been enough water rushing off the mountain to keep the lake at a level higher than the breast of the dam (a properly engineered dam, that is) for many hours? It seems unlikely. Moreover, it was clear from the engineering studies made, and from photographs taken of the dam after the break, that it was that part of the dam which had been repaired by Ruff and his crew which went out on the afternoon of the 31st.
But even if it were assumed, for the sake of argument, that the Ruff repairs were as solid as the original dam, that the spillway obstructions did not greatly diminish its capacity, and that there was no sag at the center to reduce even further the spillway’s usefulness, there still remains one very obvious and irrefutable flaw in the dam and in any argument in its defense.
Because there were no longer discharge pipes at the base of the dam, the owners never at any time had any control over the level of the lake. If the water began to rise over a period of days or weeks to a point where it was becoming dangerously high, there was simply nothing that could be done about it. If, on the other hand, the pipes had still been there, as they were up until they were removed by Congressman Reilly, or if new pipes had been installed by Ruff, then through that abnormally wet spring of 1889 the men in charge of the dam, Unger, John Parke, and others, could have kept the lake at a safe level of say at least ten to twelve feet below the crest of the dam.
So while there is no question that an “act of God” (the storm of the night of May 30-31) brought on the disaster, there is also no question that it was, in the last analysis, mortal man who was truly to blame. And if the men of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, as well as the men of responsibility in Johnstown, had in retrospect looked dispassionately to themselves, and not to their stars, to find the fault, they would have seen that they had been party to two crucial mistakes.
In the first place, they had tampered drastically with the natural order of things and had done so badly. They had ravaged much of the mountain country’s protective timber, which caused dangerous flash runoff following mountain storms; they obstructed and diminished the capacity of the rivers; and they had bungled the repair and maintenance of the dam. Perhaps worst of all they had failed—out of indifference mostly—to comprehend the possible consequences of what they were doing, and particularly what those consequences might be should nature happen to behave in anything but the normal fashion, which, of course, was exactly what was to be expected of nature. As one New England newspaper wrote: “The lesson of the Conemaugh Valley flood is that the catastrophes of Nature have to be regarded in the structures of man as well as its ordinary laws.”
The dam was the most dramatic violation of the natural order, and so as far as a few rather hysterical editorial writers were concerned, the lesson of the flood was that dams in general were bad news. The writers took up the old line that if God had meant for there to be such things as dams, He would have built them Himself.
The point, of course, was not that dams, or any of man’s efforts to alter or improve the world about him, were mistakes in themselves. The point was that if man, for any reason, drastically alters the natural order, setting in motion whole series of chain reactions, then he had better know what he is doing. In the case of the South Fork dam, the men in charge
of rebuilding it, those who were supposed to be experts in such matters, had not been expert—either in their understanding of what they did or, equally important, in their understanding of the possible consequences of what they did.
What is more, the members of the club and most of Johnstown went along on the assumption that the people who were responsible for their safety were behaving responsibly. And this was the second great mistake.
The club people took it for granted that the men who rebuilt the dam—the men reputed to be expert in such matters—handled the job properly. They apparently never questioned the professed wisdom of the experts, nor bothered to look critically at what the experts were doing. It was a human enough error, even though anyone with a minimum of horse sense could, if he had taken a moment to think about it, have realized that an earth dam without any means for controlling the level of the water it contained was not a very good idea. The responsibility was in the hands of someone else, in short, and since that someone else appeared to be ever so much better qualified to make the necessary decisions and pass judgment, then why should not things be left to him?
In Johnstown most men’s thoughts ran along the same general line, except that it was the clubmen who were looked upon as the responsible parties. And just as the clubmen were willing to accept on faith the word of those charged with the job of rebuilding the dam, so too were most Johnstown people willing to assume that the clubmen were dutifully looking to their responsibilities. If the dam was in the hands of such men as could build the mightiest industries on earth, who could so successfully and swiftly change the whole character of a city or even a country, then why should any man worry very much? Surely, those great and powerful men there on the mountain knew their business and were in control.
In the North American Review, in August 1889, in an article titled “The Lesson of Conemaugh,” the director of the U. S. Geological Survey, Major John Wesley Powell, wrote that the dam had not been “properly related to the natural conditions” and concluded: “Modern industries are handling the forces of nature on a stupendous scale…. Woe to the people who trust these powers to the hands of fools.”
It was, however, understandably difficult for the people of Johnstown ever to feel, like Cyrus Elder, that they too had been even partly to blame. Practically everyone felt that he had foreseen the coming catastrophe, and if he had not, like John Fulton, actually put anything down on paper, he, nonetheless, had been equally aware of the troubles with the South Fork dam and every bit as dubious about its future. That the members of the club were never required to pay for their mistakes infuriated nearly everyone in Johnstown and left a feeling of bitter resentment that would last for generations.
As for the club people, their summers at South Fork were over. The cottages sat high and dry along the vast mud flat which had been Lake Conemaugh and where, here and there, like the remains of some prehistoric age, stood the stumps of great trees that had been taken down more than fifty years earlier just before the dam had been built. By July grass had sprung up along South Fork Creek where it worked its way through the center of the old lake bed, and deer left tracks where they came down to drink.
For some time several cottages were occupied by Johnstown people. James McMillan, the plumber, and six or seven other men moved their families into the biggest of the houses, apparently with the consent of the owners, and, according to a notice in the Tribune at the end of July, the accommodations were as elegant as ever. But the owners themselves never came back, except for one, Colonel Unger, who not only returned, but lived out the rest of his life on the farm just above the remains of the dam. All the other property was broken up and sold off at a sheriff’s auction.
In Johnstown the Cambria works had started up again by mid July. It would be a long time before the furnaces were working to capacity, but nearly the full pay roll was being met and slowly things began to return to normal. Estimates were made on the total property damage (about $17 million). The banks opened. The Quicksteps were playing again. By August the Saturday night band concerts had been revived and a piano tuner had come to town. There was ice cream for sale; Haviland china was back on the shelves of those few stores that had been spared. A camera club was started, and the plumbers and steam fitters organized a union.
In September Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Carnegie came to town to see the flood damage, and before he left Carnegie had agreed to build a new library where the old one had been. In late fall the schools reopened.
New houses and shops were going up all over town. People who had fled the valley began coming back again. The Quinns were back by October, astonished to find how much had been accomplished and how bad the place still smelled. There was plenty of work still to be done, of course, and plenty of jobs, and it would stay that way for a long time. Just getting the place back to where it had been before would take five years or more.
But there were many who would leave Johnstown after the flood. For hundreds of people, like Victor Heiser, the disaster had deprived them of every meaningful connection with the place. Suddenly they were alone and there seemed no very strong reason for staying any longer, and particularly if they had ever had an ambition to see something of the world. Had his mother and father survived, Victor Heiser would have remained in Johnstown, probably, he would later speculate, to become a watchmaker. As it was, he left the valley within a year, and after working his way through medical school, spent most of his life as a public-health officer and physician, fighting disease around the world. He would also write a best-selling book on his experiences, An American Doctor’s Odyssey, and would be credited with saving perhaps two million lives.
There were others who could stay no longer because of the memory of what had happened. And David Beale was among those who left out of bitterness over an experience during the frantic days which had followed the disaster. In Beale’s case it had been a falling out with some of his congregation over the fact that he had turned the church into a morgue without authorization from the elders. There were plenty who rose to his defense, saying it had been the only intelligent and Christian thing to do under the circumstances and that somebody had to make the decision, but there were enough hard words exchanged to send Beale on his way to another charge in another town.
For years, too, there would be much speculation on how many of those people listed among the unfound dead were actually very much alive in some faraway place. It seemed reasonable enough to figure that some men, suddenly, in the first dim light of that terrible morning of June 1, had decided that here was an opportune time to quietly slip away to a new and better life. And if one of those names on the unknown list was somebody you had been close to, it was a whole lot pleasanter to think of him living on an apple farm in Oregon or tending bar in a San Francisco saloon than rotting away beneath six feet of river muck somewhere below Bolivar. Furthermore, such speculation seemed well justified when, eleven years later, in the summer of 1900, a man by the name of Leroy Temple showed up in town to confess that he had not died in the flood but had been living quite happily ever since in Beverly, Massachusetts. On the morning of June 1 he had crawled out of the wreckage at the bridge, looked around at what was left of Johnstown, then just turned on his heels and walked right out of the valley.
Stories of the flood would live on for years, and in time they would take on more the flavor of legends, passed along from generation to generation. Each family had its tales of where they had been when the wall of water came, where they ran to, who shouted what to whom, who picked up the baby, who went back for the horse, or how they had survived the night. Children who were only four or five years old at the time would live to be old men and women who would describe in the most remarkable detail how they had watched the flood strike the city (from a place where it would have been impossible to have seen the water) or how they had looked at their wrist watch at that exact moment (there were no wrist watches in 1889) and read (at age five!) that it was exactly such-and-such time. There would be stories of ho
w grandfather tried to save an ax handle (“of all things!”) or how Uncle Otto had thrown away his Bible when he saw what had happened. There would also be a great amount of durable gossip and some rather bad feelings about “certain people” who had somehow gotten their hands on more than their share of the relief money and how “their families are rich to this day because of it.” And at least one Irish undertaker from Pittsburgh was said to have made “a positive fortune” out of the disaster.
There would also, one day, be signs posted in saloons from one end of the country to the other saying: PLEASE DON’T SPIT ON THE FLOOR, REMEMBER THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD. At Coney Island and in Atlantic City re-creations of the great disaster would be major attractions for many seasons. And “Run for the hills, the dam has busted” would be a standard comedy line the country over for years.
In Johnstown three babies born on the fateful day would grow up with the names Moses Williams, Flood C. Raymond, and Flood S. Rhodes.
General Hastings would later be elected governor largely because of the name he had made for himself at Johnstown; and when William Flinn later became the Republican boss of Pittsburgh and a state senator, he made it a practice to remind election-year audiences of the job he had done at Johnstown.
Tom L. Johnson, who later gave up a lucrative business career to become the highly progressive (some said “socialistic”) mayor of Cleveland, would use the flood to make a case for his political philosophy. In his autobiography he would write at length about the disaster and its cause and how charity had vitiated local energies (he was still Moxham’s man in this regard). The flood, he would conclude, was caused “by Special Privilege,” and: “The need of charity is always the result of the evils produced by man’s greed.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 267