Ogden liked Hall better as a man. Choate may have been the more intellectual barrister, but Ogden thought that his fellow Harvard Law School graduate’s aristocratic gentility often camouflaged a condescending air of superiority. Hall, a graduate of Boston University, was no less astute than Choate, but enjoyed a good legal street fight at the same time. He had a tough streak, an edge, a poker player’s willingness to take risks, even a sense of sarcasm in the courtroom that Ogden found appealing. Hall and Choate were both men of means, both well-respected attorneys, both scions of Boston’s oldest money, but Hall seemed more comfortable with average men, a trait Ogden believed he himself shared with the plaintiffs’ lawyer. Choate was diligent and honest enough, but also facile, bombastic, and often reluctant to get his hands dirty, traits Ogden found distasteful. The two men had chosen sides well in this case; it strained Ogden’s imagination to envision Choate representing poor Italian immigrants and Irish city workers in their fight against a major national corporation. Conversely, Hall would relish the task, viewing himself as a guardian of the common man’s rights.
None of this would matter tomorrow, of course. Once Ogden set foot in the courtroom and ascended to the bench, he would subjugate his personal feelings about both men, and rely on the rule of law and his own strength of judgment and fairness.
Ogden finished his work and prepared to leave the office, which for at least the next six weeks, would no longer be his regular workplace. He might stop in occasionally after the molasses hearings had concluded for the day, but he expected the testimony to consume most of his time. He had even informed Hall and Choate that he was willing to continue the hearings until 10 P.M. any time it was necessary, to give laborers a chance to testify without jeopardizing a day’s pay, or worse, their jobs. Both lawyers had grumbled before grudgingly conceding Ogden’s point and agreeing to the unusual schedule.
The lightning flashed in the northern sky and the thunder rumbled closer. Ogden hoped for a torrential late-afternoon rainstorm to cool the city.
One other prominent Boston attorney would play a role in how history would mark the molasses case. Dudley H. Dorr, owner of two Commercial Street buildings destroyed by the flood, became trustee for the consolidated cases brought by the plaintiffs. On July 1, 1918, Dorr had joined forces with Boston attorney Richard Hale to form Hale & Dorr, which would one day become Boston’s largest and most prestigious law firm. For now, Dorr’s participation in the biggest civil suit in Massachusetts history—the Great Boston Molasses Flood case—meant that the court proceedings were officially catalogued as Dorr v. United States Industrial Alcohol.
August 10–September 8, 1920
“This was one of the worst catastrophes which has visited the City of Boston in my remembrance,” declared attorney Damon Hall in his opening statement for the plaintiffs. “We have all been accustomed to make fun of cold molasses, but this experience, which occurred in the heart of Boston at noon in January, 1919, taught us that cold molasses has death-dealing and destructive powers equal to the tornado or the cyclone when it is suddenly unloosed.”
Hall’s statement came on Wednesday, August 11, the second day of the hearings; day one was a succession of scheduling and procedural details that needed to be ironed out at the outset of any major trial or hearing. The lengthiest haggling had come during discussion of the court’s start time. On Monday mornings, Damon Hall’s train arrived in Boston from his suburban Belmont home just before 11 A.M., and his colleague, Endicott Peabody Saltonstall, arrived at 10:30 A.M. Thus, Ogden agreed that Monday proceedings would begin at 11 A.M. Since all the lawyers would stay in Boston overnight during the week, Ogden ordered court to begin at 9:30 A.M. Tuesday through Friday. “I feel a little pressure to get started and moving on this case,” Ogden told the attorneys. Henry Dolan, one of USIA’s lawyers, urged Ogden not to hold hearings on Saturdays. Ogden agreed reluctantly: “These gentlemen who have families at the shore, I think would go on strike if we tried to sit on Saturday,” the auditor lamented.
After the procedural issues had been decided on Tuesday, Ogden adjourned the session, and Hall began his opening statement first thing on Wednesday. Hall was not a large man, but he commanded attention in the courtroom.
“Now I have no doubt that your Honor had occasion to see many of the devastated areas of France,” Hall said to Ogden. “If you take a little section of one of those devastated areas, and put in it dead men and dead horses, and then cover it with molasses, you get some idea of what this (scene) looked like a few minutes after this occurrence … on January 15, 1919, shortly before one o’clock, a time when fortunately a good many people who otherwise would be using Commercial Street were at their lunch … (this) giant reservoir constructed in the heart of a busy section, for the purpose of holding a heavy fluid, suddenly gave way, deluged the surrounding territory, took twenty-one lives, and did property damage amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Hall said he would not use his opening statement “to place my finger upon the negligence, or unlawfulness, or whatever you call it, which was responsible for this accident … and I shall not, at this time, attempt in any way to advance any theories as to the cause of this accident.” That, Hall declared, would become apparent during his questioning of witnesses and in his closing arguments. In his opening, he would “stick to the facts” to outline his case. But in Hall’s skillful hands, the facts themselves carried more than a whiff of accusation.
“It is important for your Honor to know the size of this steel container,” he said. “The height of the steel reservoir was fifty feet, but it is very difficult to appreciate figures on their own. But the height of the tank, from the surface of the foundation to the top of its roof, was fully twice the height of this courtroom. The elevated (railroad) structure is about thirty feet in height. So this tank towered above the elevated structure for twenty feet. The diameter of this steel reservoir was ninety feet, or a diameter equal, substantially, to twice the length of this courtroom. It was an enormous reservoir, built and intended to contain an enormous amount of molasses.”
Hall painted a similar picture when he described the weight of the molasses in the tank. “When we speak of 2.3 million gallons of molasses, it is impossible for the mind to work readily to conceive what that means,” he said, “and so I want to just use one or two illustrations to show the weight of molasses in that reservoir at the time this thing occurred. Two million, three-hundred thousand gallons of molasses is something over 26 million pounds … thirteen thousand tons. One of our big Mogul locomotive engines weighs about a hundred tons. So that this steel reservoir contained on the day of the accident a weight of molasses equal to 130 hundred-ton locomotive engines … or thirteen thousand Ford automobiles, which weigh about a ton each.”
Hall described the suffering of the victims—the violent deaths of Bridget Clougherty, Maria Distasio, and Pasquale Iantosca; the valiant struggle of George Layhe before he succumbed under the firehouse; the pain-wracked torment of John Barry as he lay pinned a few feet from Layhe, awaiting rescuers. He listed the property that the molasses waves destroyed, including the elevated railroad, whose “enormous support pillars were doubled up as if they were willow trees” by the combined weight of the molasses and the steel pieces of the crushed tank. The molasses wave swept through the North End Playground, Hall said, “a place that was frequented in summer by thousands upon thousands of the dwellers of the North End; men, women, and children, particularly the women and the children who went to that playground to escape the heat of the city.”
When Charles Choate interrupted Hall’s opening by noting that the accident occurred in the dead of winter, Hall snapped back: “That is true, but you kept your tank there in July, as well as in January, and … there was coasting and skating on the North End Playground by the children of the city in the cold weather.”
Hall implored Ogden to tour the North End site to get a genuine feel for the area, to see how the 2.3 million gallons of molasses “let loos
e … the tank folded back and fell and the molasses went in all directions … north, south, east, and west, demolishing structures as if they were houses of cards … flooding cellars and destroying goods. Men who were eating their noon-day lunch were overwhelmed and drowned … a woman and two children were crushed. That is a picture of what occurred that day … when a structure, erected in such a locality, designed to be used as this reservoir was used, when it suddenly gives way, carrying with it death and destruction …”
As he had promised, Damon Hall finished his opening statement without mentioning a cause or blaming anyone for the molasses flood—yet, in his colorful choice of words, the passion of his language, and the graphic flavor of his descriptions, he left no doubt whom he held responsible for the disaster.
USIA’s lead attorney, Charles Choate, would not begin his opening remarks for several weeks, until after Hall had called some preliminary witnesses to describe the scene of devastation on the waterfront after the giant tank let loose.
On August 16, 1920, a week after the molasses flood hearings had begun, while Hall was questioning witnesses in Boston, Bartolomeo Vanzetti was sentenced in a Plymouth courtroom for a December 24, 1919, hold-up in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The anarchist was sentenced to twelve to fifteen years, “one day thereof solitary imprisonment and the residue of said term confinement of hard labor,” although he had no previous criminal record and no one was hurt in the hold-up.
After the sentence, Vanzetti was sent to state prison to await trial with his fellow anarchist, Sacco, on the South Braintree murders.
Their anarchist comrades, who had been relatively quiet for most of the summer, began to stir again.
On Thursday, September 2, Charles Choate took center stage in Hugh Ogden’s courtroom to deliver opening remarks in what he believed was a winning strategy for USIA. It would take him most of the day, plus a second morning, Wednesday, September 8, when court resumed after the Labor Day holiday.
Choate got off to an inauspicious start when he arrived late, and before launching into the substance of his remarks, apologized to Ogden. “I know that your Honor’s mind will be open to a fair consideration of the facts (although) your Honor’s views have almost universally been opposed to mine,” Choate said. Ogden replied that neither Choate’s tardiness nor his differences with the auditor would have any bearing on the molasses case. “I sometimes think I have fatal facility for encountering men whose views are opposed to mine,” he said. “I am not offended in the slightest.”
Unlike Hall, Charles Choate’s opening argument did provide a window into the heart of the defense’s case. “What was there to have caused a tank containing a perfectly harmless substance, in common commercial use, to go down with every indication that its breaking was caused by some tremendous explosive force?” Choate asked. The tank was built “by reputable people, who were skillful in this kind of work … it was carefully painted and kept in perfect condition … there is no suggestion of a defect or deterioration in the tank which could account for the fracture in any way.”
No, Choate argued, the molasses disaster was not due to any accident, or structural defect, and once those causes were eliminated, “your mind is drawn irresistibly to the conclusion that the tank could not have collapsed without the operation of some agency which, in an instant of time, multiplied the pressure on that outside shell hundreds or thousands of times.”
Choate said USIA would show evidence of persons in the vicinity of the tank—“we can’t pretend to name them”—whose activities included “dynamite outrages in this immediate community … One was the explosion at Judge Hayden’s house. Others were the placing of bombs in police stations and the stealing of dynamite from storehouses.”
Choate reminded the court that anarchists had placed inflammatory posters along fences near the molasses tank, and that the “federal cordon was withdrawn” around the tank once the armistice was signed ending the Great War. “At the time of the accident no one connected with the defendant was on the premises,” Choate argued. “There was a flight of steps that led to the top of the tank which was necessary to permit the gaugers of U.S. Customs to make their measurements and keep their records … it was an easy thing for a person to go up those stairs, get onto the top of the tank, and drop down an explosive device through one of the four manholes.”
Choate said the defense would present evidence that USIA was involved “almost exclusively in the production of alcohol for making munitions” during the war, “and that fact was well known to the general public and evilly disposed persons alike.”
Choate then offered a glimpse of the company’s “expert witness” defense, revealing that USIA had hired metallurgists to conduct an experiment with a “replica tank” filled with molasses. “They used dynamite ignited by a fuse of the kind I have described, dropped it to the bottom, and that experiment disclosed fractures and ruptures and twisting and bulging of the plate that exactly agrees with what occurred here,” Choate said. “This study was conducted by scientific men of high repute … and shows, as conclusively as circumstantial evidence can show, the cause that produced this catastrophe.”
Much of the damage around the tank, Choate argued, was caused not by the flow of molasses but by the concussion of a dynamite explosion. “It was sufficient to break glass at a considerable distance, to throw and shatter all kinds of wooden and metal objects, to rend and shatter them into kindling wood, to spatter—and I used that word with a purpose—to spatter molasses to the places where the wave of molasses never reached at all … the appearance of things about the tank point to the action of an explosive, and could only attend the action of an explosive.”
Apparently concerned that Ogden would not be fully aware of what was at stake for USIA in the case, Choate stressed its importance: “There has seldom been a case tried in this County … that involved more important issues of law, or involved a larger sum of money than in the aggregate is involved here, because the damages that are claimed by these plaintiffs run into many hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Why would they be entitled to anything, Choate argued, when it was clear that “for a person who had an evil purpose, and the opportunity to reach the top of the tank … it would have required no more than five pounds of dynamite—probably less—to have accomplished everything that happened there? And that dynamite could have been carried—as it has been carried scores of times when these outrages have occurred here in this community at about this time—in a pipe of comparatively short length, not over a foot long and not over three inches in diameter.”
With certainty and righteousness ringing in his words, Choate concluded: “There was some explosive agent introduced into that tank which so increased the pressure by its explosion that the rupture was due to that—and not to the static pressure of the molasses itself.”
Damon Hall and Charles Choate had drawn the battle lines with passion and precision in Hugh Ogden’s courtroom. The civil suit would determine who, if anyone, was responsible for the terrible disaster on Commercial Street in January 1919, and what should be done about it. Most of those who had been killed were the breadwinners for their wives and children, families who were now struggling to survive. Many of the injured had been out of work for months and now had little or no means of support. Some would never return to work.
A victory for Hall and the plaintiffs, if they could prove that the tank collapsed due to USIA’s negligence, would provide some financial relief for these people, even if lives could not be restored or injured bodies made whole. But if Charles Choate and his team could convince Ogden that the climate of unrest and violence in Boston and America in 1919 had incited anarchists to destroy the tank with dynamite, the victims of the molasses flood would likely wind up with nothing.
New York City, September 16, 1920
Charles Francis Choate was a brilliant and respected member of the Massachusetts legal community, a professional and a gentleman, a man about whom a colleague would one day say, “
there was, there is, no better, braver, stronger man.” Such a man, a lover of the law, would be angered by the use of violence as a means to achieve results, would be appalled if innocent people were injured or killed because of that violence.
But in the places none of us like to visit—the darkest corners of the mind, the coldest reaches of the heart—Charles F. Choate must have felt a sense of perverse satisfaction when he received word on the afternoon of September 16 that someone, most likely an anarchist, had detonated a deadly bomb on Wall Street in New York City. As awful as the noontime explosion had been, killing nearly forty innocent people, the tragic event instantly enhanced the credibility of the opening argument Choate had delivered just days earlier, affirmed his circumstantial thesis, offered a timely and deadly reminder that violence was still a way of life for anarchists.
The Wall Street bombing was the most deadly anarchist action in America. In addition to the dead, more than two hundred people were injured, and property damage exceeded $2 million. The blast originated on the north side of Wall Street in front of the Subtreasury building and the U.S. Assay Office, directly across the street from the banking house of J.P. Morgan and an excavation where the New York Stock Exchange was building an annex. It was lunch hour, and an endless stream of office workers had just started pouring into the streets from buildings in the neighborhood.
“Suddenly, a cloud of yellowish, black smoke and a piercing jet of flame leaped from the street outside the Morgan offices,” reported the Associated Press. “Then came a deafening blast. A moment later, scores of men, women, and children were lying prostrate on the ground and the streets were covered with debris from thousands of broken windows and torn facades of adjacent buildings. Ten minutes later, the stock and curb exchanges, the financial pulse of the world, had closed. Panic and confusion reigned in the heart of New York’s financial district.”
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