Thousands of office workers fled in terror from adjoining buildings; scores fell and were trampled in the rush. The noise of the explosion had been heard throughout lower Manhattan and across the river in Brooklyn, “and brought thousands of the curious to the scene.” Downtown hospitals went on full alert, and makeshift medical stations were set up in the lobbies of nearby buildings, where nurses and doctors treated the less seriously injured. The few police on duty in the district were unable to cope with the crowds and downtown police stations were notified to send additional men. Subtreasury officials, fearing looters might try to rob the building—which the blast had seriously damaged—requested the assistance of military authorities at Governor’s Island, and officials dispatched a company of troops to guard the building.
Overnight, authorities launched a widespread investigation extending into every section of the country. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer called the blast “part of a gigantic plot” to overthrow the capitalist system. Extra guards were placed at all government buildings in Washington, D.C. William J. Flynn, chief of the Bureau of Investigation, went to New York the next day to oversee the investigation. He told the press that his agents had collected convincing evidence that the bombing was planned by a group of anarchists who perpetrated the “bomb outrages” of June 1919. The motive, Flynn believed, was revenge for the prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and for Salsedo’s death earlier in the year, which anarchists still insisted was not a suicide.
Among the evidence Flynn cited were several circulars found by a letter carrier in a mailbox on the corner of Cedar Street and Broadway, a few blocks from the scene, with the following message printed in red ink:
Remember.
We will not tolerate.
Any longer.
Free the political prisoners
Or it will be sure death
For all of you.
AMERICAN ANARCHIST
FIGHTERS
The signature, combining those of Go-head! (“The American Anarchists”) and Plain Words (“The Anarchist Fighters”), convinced Flynn—most likely correctly—that Galleanists had been behind the Wall Street bombing. Later, Flynn announced that the anarchists had left the bomb in a horse-drawn wagon that they had hitched to a pole on Wall Street, “with the timing device set a few minutes ahead.” Three minutes later the bomb exploded. The horse and wagon were blown to bits.
A massive manhunt ensued. Detectives and federal agents visited nearly five thousand stables along the Eastern seaboard in a vain effort to trace the horse, according to historian Paul Avrich. Police did find the maker of the horseshoes, a blacksmith in Manhattan’s Little Italy section, “who recalled that the day before the explosion a (Sicilian) man had driven such a horse and wagon into his shop and had a new pair of shoes nailed to the hooves.”
Though the bomber was never found, Avrich has surmised that the Wall Street explosion was the work of Galleanist anarchist Mario Buda, a close comrade of Sacco and Vanzetti—“the best friends I had in America”—who believed he was retaliating against America’s financial power structure in retaliation for the September 11 murder indictments of his friends for the South Braintree killings. “The victims of the blast,” Avrich noted, “far from being the financial powers of the country, were mostly runners, stenographers, and clerks. Buda was surely aware that innocent blood might be spilled. He was a man, however, who stopped at nothing.”
Avrich traced Buda’s movements from New York to Providence, where the anarchist secured a passport from the Italian vice-consul, and a few weeks later sailed back to Italy. By the end of November, he was back in his native Romagna, “never again to return to the United States.”
Several days after the Wall Street bombing, Boston mayor Andrew Peters received a threatening letter, mailed from New York, accusing him of having the “blackest and yellowest” government in the country and warning him that he was being watched, and that a “better job” would be done in Boston than was done in New York. The letter was signed “The Reds.” Peters turned the letter over to police, but said he intended to take no special precautions to protect himself.
However, in Boston’s financial district, Secret Service agents guarded federal buildings, including the subtreasury, the post office, the Federal Reserve bank, and the Internal Revenue offices. “The financial section of Boston is plentifully supplied with plainclothesmen and a large number of uniformed men are patrolling the streets of that district as a precautionary measure against attempted repetition of the New York bomb outrage here,” the Boston Herald reported. Police officials gave orders for officers to act against “loiterers or suspicious looking persons or vehicles,” and to examine any vehicle, “motor drawn or horse drawn that may have a suspicious aspect.” Guards were also placed around the perimeter of the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill.
Once again, Boston was a city on alert, this time against an enemy that was difficult to identify and one that could strike from almost anywhere, at anytime.
There is no mention in the historical record of whether extra guards were placed around Boston’s courthouses. But in Hugh Ogden’s courtroom, the Wall Street bombing, just five weeks into the molasses hearings, could not have failed to create an impression among all parties.
Neither Hall, Choate, nor Ogden referred to the New York City tragedy specifically in open court, but each must have pondered one question in connection with the molasses case, from vastly different perspectives—Hall with distress, Choate with the moral outrage of one who is pained to be right about man’s capacity for evil, and Ogden with the quizzical conjecture of all good arbiters:
If anarchists could explode a bomb at high noon in the heart of New York City’s financial district in September 1920, couldn’t they have done the same thing at the same time of day in the heart of Boston’s commercial waterfront district in January 1919?
More than anything else, the outcome of the molasses case depended on the answer to this single question.
ELEVEN
FACTOR OF SAFETY
Late September 1920
As New York recovered from the Wall Street tragedy, and law enforcement authorities offered their theories on the explosion, Charles Choate was taking his expert witnesses through their own bomb story in Hugh Ogden’s Boston courtroom.
Choate’s strategy was to impress Ogden with the brainpower and credentials of the distinguished men he would call to the stand, one after another, a parade of academicians and professionals who would validate USIA’s thesis that an “evilly disposed person” had dropped an “infernal device” into the molasses tank, causing it to explode. Choate called engineering professors George E. Russell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George F. Swain of Harvard, as well as Lewis E. Moore, engineer of the Massachusetts Public Utility Commission, all of whom testified as hydraulic and structural experts. Each proffered the same conclusion: that the tank was structurally safe, although admittedly, the “factor of safety” of the tank’s walls was materially less than they would have provided. (The factor of safety is a number that describes the maximum amount of pressure the walls could withstand without buckling; a factor of safety of 3 would mean that the tank could withstand a force equivalent to three times the total pressure exerted on its walls by the contents inside.) Choate also questioned nationally renowned metallurgist Albert Colby, who spent three weeks on the stand testifying about the tensile strength of steel, its properties at different temperatures, and its ability to withstand the changing stress levels created by fermenting molasses.
In addition, Russell, along with Choate’s other expert witnesses—professor A. H. Gill of MIT’s chemical department and state police chemist Walter Wedger—testified that they had conducted tests, both at MIT and at USIA facilities in Baltimore, using a smaller replica of the Commercial Street tank. At MIT, they had filled the thirty-foot model tank with water; in Baltimore, they had used molasses. The blast ripped a hole in the side of the tank and damaged the steel walls
in a fashion similar to the way the actual steel plates had been damaged after the real tank collapsed.
Choate scored a courtroom coup by convincing the fifty-nine-year-old Wedger, an eleven-year veteran of the State Police Department of Public Safety, to testify for USIA. Wedger had broad and lengthy experience in dealing with explosives, and his reputation was impeccable. He had responsibility for enforcing all state regulations governing the handling of explosives and inflammable material, including the inspection of buildings where they were stored. He was also the first person called to the scene to investigate explosions, fires of suspicious origin, and illegal explosives of “any kind found anywhere, all over the state.” Prior to his work with the state, he had served as superintendent and chemist for a fireworks manufacturing company. Wedger had been trained at MIT, but most of his working knowledge had been passed on by his father, who was a distinguished chemist and pyrotechnist killed in an explosion in 1895. “For more than forty years, I have studied explosives and inflammables,” Wedger said.
Now this longtime explosives expert, an eminent state police chemist, perhaps the most knowledgeable person in Massachusetts on the effects of dynamite, TNT, and nitroglycerine, stated under oath what USIA needed Ogden to hear. Wedger, who had initially stated publicly, and under oath at Judge Bolster’s 1919 inquest, that there was no evidence of any explosion on Commercial Street, reversed that opinion when Charles Choate put him on the stand:
Choate: State again what your opinion is as to the cause that produced the accident.
Wedger: I should say it was caused by an explosion.
Choate: And what kind of explosive?
Wedger: It might be most any kind of high explosive—dynamite or nitroglycerine.
Choate: Suppose a person had taken dynamite in some sort of a container to the top of that tank, with the fuse wound around the container, and lighted it with his pipe, or cigarette, or cigar, and dropped it through the manhole at the top, so that the burning end of the fuse had immediately gone under the molasses, would that [molasses] have put out the fuse?
Wedger: No, sir.
Choate: How much dynamite or nitroglycerine would be required [to destroy the tank]?
Wedger: Anywhere from five to fifteen pounds; twelve or fifteen pounds.
Choate: How large a package, or container, would be required to hold that amount?
Wedger: Ten pounds would require a pipe three inches in diameter, about two-and-a-half feet long.
Choate had drawn first blood. He had succeeded in eliciting sworn testimony from a distinguished and disinterested law enforcement expert, an unpaid witness, one whose word was above reproach, that the Commercial Street molasses disaster had been no accident.
But USIA’s advantage didn’t last long. Under cross-examination, Damon Hall filleted Walter Wedger, using against him his own inquest testimony, and reducing the cool, experienced state police chemist to a near-incoherent state, a man who at best appeared befuddled and a parser of words, and at worst, came across in court as an outright liar.
First, Hall asked Wedger to describe a “common explosion scene” and then took him through the day of the disaster, when the chemist visited the scene about an hour after the tank collapsed. At any explosion, Wedger said, the concussive force of the blast shatters windows and glass “for many hundreds of feet” from the actual bomb; broken glass, Wedger said, “is one of the almost inseparable evidences” of a dynamite or nitroglycerine explosion.
Hall: So, given that, did you find any of the common evidences of a dynamite explosion [at the molasses scene]?
Wedger: I did not.
Hall: Nowhere on that day were you able to find that cardinal evidence [broken glass] of a dynamite or high explosive explosion [sic], were you?
Wedger: I did not find it.
Hall: Did you see any effect that day, such as you would expect to find where a high explosive has been used?
Wedger: No, sir.
Hall: Did you see any evidence in any of the parts [of the tank wall] that were collected … from which you could make up your mind that dynamite or any other high explosives had caused the failure?
Wedger: Did not, no sir.
Next, Hall reminded Wedger that he had collected a sample of both the “old” molasses that had been stored in the tank and the “new” molasses that the Miliero had pumped in days before the explosion. Since the new, warmer molasses had been pumped into the tank from the bottom, it pushed up against the colder molasses already in the tank. Wedger had conducted his test in a similar way. Hall quoted Wedger from his 1919 testimony during the inquest: “I took some of the molasses to the State laboratory and gave it a test to see just about what it contained and its purity, and inside of an hour after it reached there, I noticed bubbles coming from the top of it, fermentation taking place … I then connected up a quart bottle of molasses to a pressure gauge, and in twenty-four hours, I got a pressure of half a pound; in forty-eight hours, I got a pressure of a full pound.”
Fermentation is the process by which sugar, or molasses, is converted to alcohol by microscopic yeasts that thrive in the absence of oxygen, a process used commercially to produce wine. Wedger acknowledged that, as the yeasts grew in number inside the tank, they would also produce carbon dioxide gas as a by-product of the fermenting process. The pressure from the gas would seek a release of some sort.
Hall: Did you testify under oath at the inquest that the upper layers (of molasses) would effectively act as tamping agents, and pressure [inside the tank] running into very high figures would develop?
Wedger: I don’t remember that I said or made any such statement.
Hall: You do not? Did you say that the upper mass of molasses was so leathery [because it was cold] that in your opinion it was an effective tamping which prevented the escape of the gas?
Wedger: It would act more or less as a tamping owing to its higher viscosity, but it would not prevent the escape of gas through it.
Hall: Wouldn’t it? Let me read what you said under oath about the matter: “That gas has to go somewhere. It tries to get up through these several feet of leathery substance and it takes a long time for it to get up through there, and at the same time it exerts a certain fermenting pressure.” Do you remember that testimony?
Wedger: Yes it seems to me that I do.
Hall: Then owing to the cold weather, in your opinion, that mass of molasses was so leathery that it would hold back the escape of the gas and cause a fermenting pressure on the sides of the tank?
Wedger: There would be some amount of pressure on the sides of the tank … but it would not fully prevent its ultimate escape [through the molasses] … a certain amount of pressure on the sides of the tank, yes. I don’t know how that could be figured.
Hall: Do you remember saying to the grand jury that if the tank had the proper factor of safety that any pressure which might be exerted against the sides by this gas in the process of fermentation, that there would not be “any chance for the thing to give way?”
Wedger: I do remember that that was the way I felt about it.
Hall had succeeded in getting Wedger to admit two critical points under oath. The fact that the state police chemist had discovered no broken glass at the Commercial Street scene (beyond the windows that had been smashed by the molasses wave itself), meant that the customary “cardinal evidence” of a concussive explosion was lacking. Second, because the cold molasses most likely blocked or trapped the carbon dioxide gas fermenting below (between the warm and cold layers of molasses), the gas would almost certainly exert pressure against the sides of the tank looking for escape.
Having elicited those concessions from a key defense witness, Hall dispatched of Wedger with a flourish:
Hall: Did you ever, until your testimony this morning, express to anybody—Judge Bolster, your superior, the State Police or anybody else—that the cause of the Commercial Street tank collapse was dynamite, or some other high explosive of that nature?
W
edger: I had not fully formed my opinion until he [Charles Choate] asked the question.
Hall: This morning, then, for the first time in your life, you either formed or expressed the opinion that dynamite was the cause of this disaster.
Wedger: I had thought it over.
Hall: But you formed or expressed it for the first time this morning?
Wedger: It is the first time I have been asked for an opinion.
Hall: And the first time you have ever formed the opinion?
Wedger: Well, I couldn’t form one until he told me what to form it on.
Hall: I see. Well then, your answer, sir, is based upon his [Choate’s] hypothesis only?
Wedger: Why, absolutely so.
Wedger’s woeful performance was magnified by the fact that Charles Choate and USIA were relying almost entirely on expert witnesses to prove their case—and Wedger was the only one of these who was not being paid by the company. Choate was not calling a single representative of USIA to vouch for the tank’s sturdiness, or to justify the decision to build the tank in the North End neighborhood.
In addition, Choate had called, and would call, just one eyewitness. Her name was Winnifred McNamara, a widow who lived at 548 Commercial Street, across the street from where the tank had stood. Her demeanor and testimony appeared to do as much to hurt the defense as help it. McNamara said she was hanging laundry on the roof of her home just after 12:30 P.M. on the day the tank collapsed. Just before she saw the roof “push away” from the tank, McNamara testified that she had seen smoke rising from the vicinity of the tank. “I saw smoke rising, and then the whole top slid off … just as a dish on a table would slide off, and then the molasses walked up, just walked up, and you know the froth and the smoke, like, walked up to the top, but I didn’t see the sides going out … I heard a sound like this: r-r-r-r-r-r, a kind of heavy sound. In a few minutes I was lifted from the corner over to that corner, and I was hit on the side, and I pitched back on the broad of my back, and after that I couldn’t tell no more.”
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