Two weeks after closing arguments began in the molasses trial, Vice President and former Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge was formally administered the oath of office by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, himself a former president. Coolidge, born on the most American of holidays, July 4, was fifty-one-years-old. He initially had been sworn in as the nation’s thirtieth president by his father, a notary public, on the night Warren Harding died.
Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts in 1919 when the molasses tank collapsed.
Now he was the third president to serve during the extraordinary court case that had followed.
TWELVE
“A SORDID STORY”
Thursday, September 20, 1923
If Charles Choate could have chosen the time to deliver a closing argument in defense of the virtues of a large American industrial corporation, he would have been hard-pressed to select a more opportune month than September 1923. The economy was expanding, production had reached new heights, Americans had money to spend, and Big Business, unencumbered by the government interference of the war years, was the roaring engine that was powering the prosperity.
September in Boston exemplified the economic optimism and confidence that was sweeping the country. More than a million people had traveled through the city over the Labor Day holiday, breaking all records. The travelers were lured by promising weather and improved business conditions, according to the Boston Herald. Railroads and steamships, their terminals jammed, “reached the limits of their resources and have thrown up their hands while hoping for the best” in their efforts to accommodate the vacationing public. Highways to the north, west, and south of Boston were filled, “miles distant … with a boiling current of motor cars … for 20 miles or more on most of the trunk roads, the greatest possible speed was a sluggish five miles an hour.”
Labor Day travel had been September’s first positive economic signpost in Massachusetts. Many others followed.
Textile mill owners predicted that their factories would be operating at full capacity for the fall months, which would mean full employment as well.
More than ten thousand people witnessed the opening of a new commercial airport in East Boston on September 8 that would transform Boston into an international aviation and economic center (and would one day be named for another prominent Boston judge-soldier, Lt. Gen. Edward Lawrence Logan).
Employees of the Boston Edison Electric Illuminating Company celebrated the company’s generation of a connected load of five hundred thousand kilowatts, enough power to light one hundred thousand homes or a continuous line of lamps set eighteen inches apart on both sides of a roadway from Boston to San Francisco.
And on September 18, just two days before Choate delivered his closing statement, the National Motor and Accessory Manufacturers Association Convention opened in Boston, with organizers predicting that nearly 4 million cars and trucks would be produced and sold in 1923, making it the “greatest year in the automotive industry’s history.” One Studebaker executive crowed: “The automobile is so interwoven into our national life that the production and sale of motor cars is a fixed and stable business that nothing can undermine.”
Textile companies. Electric companies. Aviation companies. Automotive companies. Charles Choate knew that these were reputable, established, rock-solid organizations that were responsible for America’s economic expansion and higher standard of living.
United States Industrial Alcohol was in the same class—a major employer, a leader in its industry, a national company with many smaller suppliers who depended on its success. To single USIA out, to find it liable for the molasses disaster and force it to pay exorbitant damages in this lawsuit, would be a step backward, a return to excessive government regulations and restrictions that contributed to the economic stagnation immediately following the war.
Again, Choate hoped Auditor Hugh Ogden would see it the same way.
“What is more plausible?” boomed Choate as he rose to begin his closing remarks. “Did this tank collapse because of structural weakness, or did it collapse because of an agency set in motion by some unknown third person who had access to it? This is where we come to; that is where we are at grips.” Choate suggested to Hugh Ogden that the choice was obvious, so long as Ogden could overcome his “reluctance to find that a thing was destroyed by dynamite in a civilized place like the City of Boston.”
Choate briefly countered the plaintiffs’ claim that the tank was improperly designed and constructed to withstand the weight and pressure of 2.3 million gallons of molasses. “The tank was built by experienced tank builders,” he said. “They had built thousands of them … the tank size presented no unusual problems to the Hammond Iron Works … it was designed by them with an experience of years and successful construction and maintenance behind them. There was no use of defective or improper material. There was no employment of unskilled or inexperienced men in the construction of this tank. It was a good workmanlike job, done by experienced, workmanlike people, out of first-class material.”
Beyond that, Choate argued, January 15, 1919, was “an ordinary winter day, without extreme wind or other extremes for our climate that all buildings did not withstand without the slightest consequence.” In addition, he pointed out that the tank had been “filled to capacity about a dozen times” before the accident happened [actually, seven times]. “If it did not have sufficient structural strength to withstand a load of molasses which was in it at the time of the disaster, it would have failed the first time that it was filled with a similar load.”
No, Choate said, a review of the evidence, circumstantial as it was, could lead only to the conclusion that dynamite destroyed the tank. Nor should the fact that the evidence was only circumstantial weaken the defendant’s case. “You haven’t got any evidence to the effect that a man went there and placed dynamite there,” Choate conceded, “but there are as many human eyes that saw a man place dynamite there, as human eyes saw the metal stretch and these pieces gradually give way.”
What was important for Ogden to consider, Choate argued, was the radical climate in Boston and the country at the time, the analysis USIA’s expert witnesses provided, the results of their experiments with the replica tank, and the testimony of Winnifred McNamara, the “closest eyewitness to the tank,” who saw a puff of white smoke near the manhole on the tank’s roof just before it collapsed.
“This tank was in a section of the city which the authorities had recognized required special guard during the existence of war time conditions,” Choate pointed out, in “danger of destruction from persons with perverted minds …”
Choate recounted the anarchist activity in Boston and emphasized that USIA’s role in the manufacture of munitions would have fueled the ire of violent anarchists operating in the North End. He reminded Ogden of the North End Police Station bombing. He stressed that a bomb had been discovered and disarmed at USIA’s Brooklyn plant before the Boston disaster, and that an “incendiary fire” had destroyed the Brooklyn facility not long afterward. He said that the company had lost two steamships at sea, “with no explanation … all we know is that one apparently broke in two and went to the bottom. The other one disappeared; nobody ever knew what became of it, and nobody ever heard of a living soul upon it.
“Then there is the evidence of the man who was there [Isaac Gonzales], of the telephone threat, where he was called up on the telephone and told that somebody was going to destroy the plant,” Choate said. “Evidently, somebody in the community, for some reason, wanted to destroy property used in this way … The threats against this property, the printed threats posted, threatening all property in that section of the city, present a most unusual background when you come to study the occurrence of a catastrophe like this.”
Again, Choate urged Ogden to suspend any disbelief he might have that anarchists could act so brazenly. “It is a surprising thing to find, and a man living in an orderly community can’t reconcile himself very quickly to the fac
t that there are people who think that way and are disposed to act that way, unless he is confronted by the fact that these things do happen. They happen in just this peaceable community in which we live …”
The results of the Baltimore experiments and the McNamara testimony offered additional powerful circumstantial evidence that an explosion was exactly what had happened on Commercial Street, Choate said. “In Baltimore, our experts built a tank and filled it with molasses,” Choate recounted. “They placed the dynamite carefully in the vicinity of the manhole. They lighted the fuse. White smoke came up—exactly the way Mrs. McNamara saw it in Boston in 1919. Then the charge was detonated and the tank split at the manhole, and a piece that weighed forty or fifty pounds was blown out forty or fifty feet by that explosion. You cannot get two accidents exactly alike, but it is illuminating … the effect of intentionally placing a charge of dynamite in relatively the same position as we believe it was placed in this [Boston] tank.”
Choate claimed that the Baltimore experiment lent credence to McNamara’s description of the scene she witnessed from the rooftop while hanging her laundry. “She was a perfectly respectable, worthy Irish woman, a little temperamental and a little restive under the cross-examination of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, but unquestionably honest and meaning to tell exactly the truth as she knew it … it is inconceivable that she could have imagined that particular phenomenon of the smoke coming out of the top of that molasses tank, unless it was there …”
Choate said Ogden’s responsibility, absent strong physical evidence on either side, “traces of which have all disappeared,” was to consider which scenario was most plausible in determining the cause of the Commercial Street disaster.
“One theory, so far as direct evidence is concerned, is just as good as the other,” Choate concluded. “[But] the experience of mankind in this region where this tank stood, is that there is a very great possibility of a destruction by explosion, just as we claim … the experience of mankind, so far as we have been able to get from the evidence in this case, is that there is a very remote possibility of a tank of this kind falling by its own structural weakness. Tanks vastly less strong have stood vastly more serious experiences and have not failed. Everybody agrees that this tank, in view of present knowledge, could have been built better than it was, but that doesn’t prove that it collapsed because it wasn’t strong enough to stand the stress. And that is the real bite of the case—whether, built as it was, it was stout enough to stand that stress, even if you could have built a better one.”
Choate rested his case, concluding his eloquent close just before 4 P.M. One of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, George L. Mayberry of the Boston Elevated Company, asked to express, “on the record … that we feel we have been favored by listening to an extremely able argument.”
The lead plaintiffs’ attorney, Damon Hall, said nothing for the record. But it was not lost on him, nor, he hoped, on Hugh Ogden, that Charles Choate had delivered his entire closing argument without addressing the deposition testimony of USIA assistant treasurer Arthur P. Jell.
In the nearly two hundred pages of trial transcript that recorded his close, Choate hadn’t even mentioned Jell’s name.
Monday, September 24, 1923
At precisely 10 A.M., Damon Everett Hall adjusted his spectacles, stood, and faced Auditor Hugh Ogden’s bench to deliver the most important closing argument of his professional career. Light rain, Boston’s first in more than three weeks, tapped against the window, the only sound in the otherwise hushed courtroom. Hall, the son of a Methodist clergyman, was approaching his forty-eighth birthday and had been practicing corporate and trial law in Boston since 1899. But never had the fate of so many depended on the strength of the case he would summarize today.
“There never was, and there never could be, any legitimate defense to this catastrophe,” he opened dramatically, “which in January of 1919, caused property damage to the extent of more than a million dollars, which brought pain and suffering to scores of people, and which blotted out the lives of more than a score of people, bringing death to them in one of its most horrid forms.”
Ridiculing the essence of USIA’s defense, Hall continued: “This alleged crime of a mythical anarchist, climbing at high noon up the side of a fifty-foot tank, in the heart of a busy city, with hundreds of people about, emerging to its roof, dropping in the manhole a mythical bomb after lighting the fuse, and then disappearing down the side of the tank in perfect peace and safety, through the railroad yard, and out into the city and then disappearing into thin air, is, I submit, nothing but the sheerest romance. Such crimes are generally committed in the dark by mortal men, not at high noon by ghosts. According to all of the experience of mankind, of course, when such crimes are contemplated or committed, they do not do it at open noon-day, with hundreds of people about, but they seek the darkness of night in which to do it.”
Hall called USIA’s claims a “ghostly defense,” citing the erratic testimony of Winnifred McNamara, the imprecise conclusions of the Baltimore experiments with the replica tank, and the contradictory testimony offered by state police chemist Walter Wedger. Hall said: “To the grand jury in 1919, Wedger had testified, ‘I am very much of the opinion that if the tank had had the proper factor of safety … there would not be any chance for the thing to give way.’ What was the court to make of this contradiction? I can’t attempt to account for what Wedger said on the witness stand here, that this tank was blown up by dynamite. It is inexplicable upon any theory of sanity or honesty—and no one questions Wedger’s sanity.”
Hall chided USIA for basing its entire defense upon a theory, without a shred of evidence that any “evilly disposed person” had been in the vicinity of the tank. “Defenses which are founded upon pure theory have done more to give a black eye to the administration of justice in our courts than all other kinds of defenses put together … the public is sick to death of theories, of the kind of insanity that comes at the moment of the crime and disappears the moment after the crime.”
The plaintiffs’ attorney handled the “anarchist defense” with sarcasm, claiming the anarchist was “an intelligent ghost, I have to admit, because he knew that the January bargain sales were on and, that for the first time in all of history, Mr. White, the [tank’s] caretaker, was to leave at twelve o’clock that day and go up town to meet his wife on a shopping tour, leaving the tank unattended.” Further, Hall said, the lack of broken glass outside of the windows that were smashed by the molasses wave also meant that, “these ghostly anarchists with their ghostly bombs produced ghostly dynamite explosions that we mortals have never heard of—and that is, the concussionless explosion.”
Hall said the defense’s claim, argued so ably by Charles Choate, “was a strain upon any man’s credulity.” The real cause of the molasses disaster was the negligence of the company, “inconceivable only in its sordidness and carelessness of human life, but in no other respect—it doesn’t require you to stretch your imagination and to go into the nether world … it is a claim based on common sense principles.”
The key plaintiffs’ contention, Hall said to Ogden, was that “from its inception in the mind of Arthur Jell, to its end, this tank, this structure, in the heart of a great city, planned and designed to hold 26 million pounds of liquid above the surface of the ground, was erected, operated, and maintained without a word of advice from any competent authority whatever, either as to its sufficiency for the purpose intended, or as to its condition during its life.”
The defense, Hall argued, tried to hide this fact from the outset of the hearings. “They didn’t tell you the facts about this tank. They left its birth and earlier years shrouded in complete mystery, and they did this deliberately and purposely because they were afraid to have the facts known … that this tank was constructed before we entered the war, when corporations were reaping the first rich profits of the war by the sale of goods to foreign governments … they wanted to keep that background from you. They rested their cas
e without calling a living soul who was responsible for the erection of their tank … They hoped to slide through without this utterly sordid tale being revealed to you.”
USIA also fought the plaintiffs’ motion to compel Jell to testify, Hall pointed out, and then refused to let Ogden see “the man charged with the duty and responsibility of erecting this tank, and who lived with it until it fell … now I don’t blame them for that attitude, because the story that you get from Jell was, as I have said and repeated, one of the most sordid stories that it is possible to imagine, where everything was sacrificed for money. I don’t blame them for not wanting you to see him or hear him.”
Hall reviewed Jell’s testimony, first his inability to read plans and blueprints because he had “been a bookkeeper and accountant all of his life,” and then his decision not to consult anyone about the factor of safety. “Think of it!” Hall shouted. “Taking a shot in the air that way [on the factor of safety of 3], this man about to erect a tank to hold 26 million pounds, above the surface of the Earth, in a crowded section of the city! A clerk, a bookkeeper ordered to construct such an engine of destruction as this tank, given blanket authority to do it, but not knowing enough about plans or specifications to read them, and not even submitting these plans to a competent engineer. It is almost inconceivable, but those are facts. They had to erect that tank in a rush, because they were losing money by storing molasses elsewhere. We are not asking you to wander off into the realm of ghosts and hobgoblins.”
Jell and USIA compounded their negligence, Hall said, by failing to properly test the tank once Hammond Iron Works had completed the job. “So of course, this structure, planned and executed and thrown together as it was, leaked from the very start,” Hall said.
Jell’s ignorance of blueprints and construction practices also meant that he lacked the knowledge to recognize that the steel plates Hammond delivered did not conform to plans, Hall said (a fact that, by definition, also refuted Choate’s claim of Hammond’s integrity). Jell’s stubbornness and desire to keep USIA’s business running at “top speed” caused him to generally ignore the warnings of Isaac Gonzales and others that the tank “leaked each and every day.” And even though Jell ordered the tank caulked twice, Hall said his disregard for the soundness of the structure and the safety of the neighborhood was epitomized by his decision to paint the tank and “disguise” the flow of molasses down its sides.
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