Dark Tide

by Stephen Puleo

  His description of the flood rings as true as any words about the disaster: “It was a tremendous calamity which would appeal to everything that is human in mankind, yet was treated with the utmost indifference by the defendant.”

  HUGH W. OGDEN, auditor and soldier, died on September 3, 1938, at age sixty-six, while he and his wife, Lisbeth, were on holiday in Bath, England. Ogden, who had been born in Bath, Maine, made the trip to his “sister city” annually. “He was one of Boston’s most prominent attorneys and a soldier with a distinguished record,” the New York Times reported in its obituary.

  Closer to home, the Boston Herald editorialized: “With hardly an exception, his clients became his friends. They trusted him. Nobody will ever know how many cases he took for which he received only a nominal fee or none at all, simply because he saw a duty which somebody ought to perform.”

  It is likely, though, that Hugh Ogden the soldier would have been most pleased and honored by the ceremony at the American Legion Post in his hometown of Brookline. The post commander presented Lisbeth with a framed copy of the official resolution memorializing Ogden’s career, and offered these words:

  “Colonel Ogden was a distinguished soldier, a conscientious and upright citizen, an eminent and brilliant lawyer, and a true and devoted Legionnaire … We will miss his friendly greeting, his kindly smile, and his unselfish service … He was a modest man, a tolerant man, a brave man, a sincere man, and—above all—an honorable man.”

  The plaintiffs in the Boston Molasses Flood case would no doubt agree.

  Boston Molasses Flood — List of Deceased

  Name Age(1) Occupation

  1. Patrick Breen 44 Laborer (North End Paving Yard)

  2. William Brogan 61 Teamster (2)

  3. Bridget Clougherty 65 Homemaker

  4. Stephen Clougherty (3) 34 Unemployed

  5. John Callahan 43 Paver (North End Paving Yard)

  6. Maria Distasio 10 Child

  7. William Duffy 58 Laborer (North End Paving Yard)

  8. Peter Francis 64 Blacksmith (North End Paving Yard)

  9. Flaminio Gallerani 37 Driver

  10. Pasquale Iantosca 10 Child

  11. James H. Kinneally Unknown (4) Laborer (North End Paving Yard)

  12. Eric Laird 17 Teamster

  13. George Layhe 38 Firefighter (Engine 31)

  14. James Lennon 64 Teamster

  15. Ralph Martin 21 Driver

  16. James McMullen 46 Foreman, Bay State Express

  17. Cesar Nicolo 32 Expressman

  18. Thomas Noonan 43 Longshoreman

  19. Peter Shaughnessy 18 Teamster

  20. John Sieberlich 69 Blacksmith (North End Paving Yard)

  21. Michael Sinnott 76 Messenger

  (1) Ages listed are according to death certificates; these were sometimes incorrect, especially for immigrants, for whom the actual date of birth was not always known.

  (2) In the language of the day, a “teamster” was, literally, a man who drove a team of horses, usually transporting a wagon full of goods.

  (3) Though Damon Hall and Martin Clougherty argued strenuously that Stephen Clougherty’s death in the insane asylum was caused by the trauma he suffered in the molasses flood, Hugh Ogden disagreed and awarded no damages for Stephen’s death.

  (4) No death certificate exists for James Kinneally. We do know, from testimony of his wife, Mary, that the couple had been married for thirty years at the time of his death. Together, they had nine children—only five of whom were still alive when Mary testified in Hugh Ogden’s courtroom.

  Bibliographic Essay

  Along with the allure of telling the molasses flood story for the first time came a flutter of uncertainty about my chances of uncovering sufficient documentation to breathe life into a little-known subject—with secondary sources scarce, primary source material would be essential to Dark Tide’s foundation.

  With help (see the acknowledgments), I struck gold. Most of the narrative and characters relating to the molasses flood in Dark Tide are based on three rich primary sources:

  Dorr v. U.S. Industrial Alcohol, the forty-volume, twenty-five-thousand-page transcript of the three years of molasses flood hearings, housed in the Social Law Library in Boston, Massachusetts.

  Reports on Damages, four boxes of Hugh Ogden’s individual awards to the victims of the flood and their families, housed in the Massachusetts Superior Court archives (Suffolk County): Box 1, Docket numbers 110980-114349; Box 2, Docket numbers 114350-115592; Box 3, Docket numbers 116777-118392; Box 4, Docket numbers 121269-126172 (April 1925).

  Hugh Ogden’s final Auditor’s Report to the Superior Court that he issued in April 1925 (copies of which are included as part of the transcripts and contained in each damage award case).

  These sources, especially the transcripts, provide stunning, often riveting, firsthand accounts from eyewitnesses, victims, family members of the deceased, and expert witnesses. One can hardly imagine a richer trove of primary source material than testimony from people who are under oath, especially when attorneys from each side asked many of the same questions I would have if I could speak to these people today. In addition, because the attorneys needed to establish the backgrounds of all the witnesses, the transcripts offer rich biographical and background information, as well as insight into the characters of all of the participants. Finally, but no less importantly, the transcripts contain important vital records, including the death certificates of those who perished in the flood, and other documents critical to the case—for example, the full exchange of letters between Arthur P. Jell and the Hammond Iron Works (including the incriminating correspondence in which Jell commends and thanks Hammond for “rushing the tank” to completion).

  Ogden’s damage reports contain his summary and assessment of every individual’s suffering or financial loss, and his rationale for awarding the amounts he did; the latter, especially, provides a revealing look into the auditor’s character and thought process. Ogden’s final fifty-plus page report offers rich background on the disaster, and tells us as much about Ogden as it does about how he weighed the testimony and evidence. Ogden is a careful writer, setting the scene remarkably well in the report, and tackling each of the major issues with literary verve and methodical analysis.

  In addition to the report itself, Ogden attached exhibits to his final document that included the lease agreement between USIA and Boston Elevated for the waterfront property on which the tank was built; the set of specifications for the tank and the steel plates that Hammond Iron Works prepared for USIA; and USIA’s permit request to the Boston Building Commissioner.

  This book is the first published account to draw on most of these sources. To my knowledge, neither the twenty-five-thousand-page transcript nor Ogden’s damage awards have ever been cited before.

  Many lines in the original double-spaced transcript pages are underlined in heavy black pencil, which I believe Ogden made as he reviewed the case in preparation for his report. When Hugh Ogden turned over the forty volumes to the Social Law Library in April 1928, he said in his cover letter: “I decided the evidence on damage in a separate report in each case. Of these latter, I have no copies available. They are on file, however, and if anyone is interested to see the way in which the matter of damages was handled, the evidence is available in the files of the Superior Court.” Evidently, there was little or no interest up to the time I tapped these records to research this book. I broke the seal on many of the individual damage awards—they had lain apparently untouched in the archives for eighty years—my white gloves sooty with fine, black dust.

  It should be noted that excerpts from Ogden’s final report have been included in a handful of magazine articles written about the flood.

  Other primary source material includes:

  The Hugh W. Ogden Collection from the University of Pennsylvania. It includes correspondence from Ogden to Horace Lippincott, some of Ogden’s Army correspondence, many of his writings and speeches, and newspap
er articles about him.

  Numerous Boston Fire Department records, including call reports, incident reports, property loss reports, and personnel cards of the key men from the Engine 31 firehouse.

  MIT Professor Spofford’s Special Examination of Commercial Street Premises of Molasses Tank, which he conducted at the direction of the Boston Building Department.

  Commonwealth of Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, In the Matter of Purity Distilling Company, Frederick M. Harrison, Petitioner, “Petition for Dissolution” (November 30, 1917, No. 28316 Eq.). The petition was granted, and all Purity assets, including the molasses tank on Commercial Street, subsequently became assets of U.S. Industrial Alcohol, Purity’s parent company.

  Boston Municipal Court, Inquest Docket Sheets (pertaining to victims of the molasses flood), prepared and filed by Judge Wilfred Bolster (March 1, 1919).

  Proceedings in the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County Upon the Presentation of a Memorial of Endicott Peabody Saltonstall (May 26, 1923), and Proceedings in the Supreme Judicial Court at Boston in Memory of Charles Francis Choate, Jr. (May 25, 1929).

  Harvard Law School Secretary’s Report, No. 1, Class of 1897 (May 1899) and Harvard Law School Secretary’s Report No. 1, Class of 1902 (April 1904).

  I used the primary sources, mainly the trial transcript, to form the heart of the book’s narrative, weaving in my knowledge of the event or the time period gleaned from other sources. For example, the prologue’s description of Isaac Gonzales’s late-night runs through the North End are drawn directly from his testimony; the intense heat that is described is taken from news accounts and weather reports of the time.

  In some cases, I have built the dramatic narrative and drawn conclusions based on a combination of primary and secondary sources, and my knowledge of a character’s background and beliefs. For example, Hugh Ogden’s letter to Lippincott from the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., is real; Ogden’s concerns about the manner in which the country has been thrown into turmoil is my interpretation based upon what I know of Ogden’s patriotism and his soldier’s attention to order.

  SECONDARY SOURCES

  Throughout the book, on virtually every subject, I consulted hundreds of pages of newspapers, primarily in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Boston Post, the Boston American, and the New York Times. Most of these are referenced directly in the text. Other secondary sources that I consulted as background, or from which I quoted, are most helpfully cited and grouped according to the following categories.

  The Flood Itself

  Since there have been no previous books written about the molasses flood, my secondary sources were limited to the newspaper accounts and a smattering of magazine articles and retrospectives through the years.

  Among the most helpful were Burtis S. Brown’s “Details of the Failure of a 90-foot Molasses Tank” in the Engineering News-Record (May 15, 1919); Richard WeinGardt’s “Molasses Spill, Boston, Massachusetts (1919)” in Neil Schlager, ed., When Technology Fails: Significant Technological Disasters, Accidents, and Failures of the Twentieth Century (Gail Research Inc., 1994); Dr. V.C. Marshall’s “The Boston, Mass., Incident of January 15, 1919” in the Loss Prevention Bulletin (Number 082); and my own “Death by Molasses” in American History (February 2001).

  Other articles I looked at included: Robert Bluhardt’s “Wave of Death” in Firehouse magazine (June 1983); Aldon H. Blackington’s “Molasses Disaster” in Yankee Yarns (New York, Dodd Mead, 1954); Michele Foster’s “Triangle Trade’s Revenge on the North End” in Northeastern University Department of History Newsletter (Winter 1994); Ralph Frye’s “The Great Molasses Flood” in Reader’s Digest (August 1955); Priscilla Harding’s “The Great Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919” in The American Legion Magazine (December 1968); and John Mason’s “The Molasses Flood of January 15, 1919” in Yankee Magazine (January 1965).

  Anarchists, 1919, Sacco and Vanzetti

  Many trees have been felled to record virtually every aspect of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, but the story of the anarchist movement in America has received comparatively little attention. For that reason, I am most grateful to Paul Avrich for his fine book, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1991), by far the most comprehensive work on both the anarchist underpinnings of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and the anarchist movement in Boston and the United States. Avrich’s work provides much of the source material for the anarchist discussion in this book, and is well worth reading.

  Other works that cover both the anarchist issue and the turmoil that rocked America in 1919 included Louis Adamic’s Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York, Chelsea House, 1983); Emma Goldman’s Living My Life (New York, Knopf, 1931); Zachary Moses Schrag’s 1919: The Boston Police Strike in the Context of American Labor (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard College, 1992, honors thesis for bachelor’s degree); Francis Russell’s A City in Terror: 1919, The Boston Police Strike (New York, The Viking Press, 1975); Rudolph J. Vecoli, ed., Italian American Radicalism: Old World Origins and New World Developments (Staten Island, N.Y., American Italian Historical Association, 1973); and Colston E. Warne’s The Steel Strike of 1919 (Boston, D.C. Heath and Company, 1963). For a later perspective on the 1920 midday bombing of Wall Street, I also referred to Nathan Ward’s “The Fire Last Time: When Terrorists First Struck New York’s Financial District” in American Heritage magazine (November/December 2001).

  The source material available on the Sacco and Vanzetti case is too lengthy to list in its entirety here, but I found the following most helpful: The Sacco-Vanzetti Case: Transcript of the Records of the Trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the Courts of Massachusetts and Subsequent Proceedings, 6 vols., 1920–7 (New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1928–29); Herbert B. Ehrmann’s The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti (Boston, Little Brown, 1969); Felix Frankfurter’s The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen (Boston, Little, Brown, 1927); Robert H. Montgomery’s Sacco-Vanzetti: The Murder and the Myth (New York, The Devin-Adair Company, 1960); and Francis Russell’s Tragedy in Dedham: The Story of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1962).

  Italian Immigrant Experience in Boston and America; Immigration in General

  The historiography of the Italian immigrant experience in America is lengthy, if largely unknown. Two works that I relied on heavily for this book are William DeMarco’s fine study Ethnics and Enclaves: Boston’s Italian North End (UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, 1981, a revision of his Boston College thesis); and my own history master’s thesis, From Italy to Boston’s North End: Italian Immigration and Settlement, 1890–1910 (Boston, University of Massachusetts-Boston, 1994). Both of these works have complete bibliographies for interested readers, but I also examined specific references for this book which are worth noting.

  For good general studies on Italian immigration and Italians settling in the United States, see Erik Amfitheatrof’s The Children of Columbus: An Informal History of Italians in the New World (Boston, Little, Brown, 1973); James A. Crispino’s, The Assimilation of Ethnic Groups: The Italian Case (New York, Center for Migration Studies, 1980); Robert F. Foerster’s The Italian Emigration of Our Times (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1919); Patrick J. Gallo’s Old Bread, New Wine: A Portrait of Italian Americans (Chicago, Nelson-Hall, 1981); Luciano Iorizzo’s and Salvatore Mondello’s The Italian Americans (Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1980); Jerry Mangione’s and Ben Morreale’s La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York, Harper Collins, 1992); Humbert Nelli’s From Immigrants to Ethnics: The Italian Americans (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1970); and Lydio F. Tomasi, ed., The Italians in America: The Progressive View, 1891–1914.

  For a greater understanding of a more pertinent theme discussed in this book, the discrimination and assimilation difficulties Italians suffered as they struggled to become Americans, see Betty Boyd Caro
li’s Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900–1914 (New York, Center for Migration Studies, 1973); Alexander DeConde’s Half Bitter, Half Sweet: An Excursion into Italian-American History (New York, Charles Scribner, 1971); Iorizzo’s and Mondello’s The Italian Americans; two fine books by Richard Gambino—Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of Italian Americans (Garden City, New York, Doubleday and Company, 1974); and Vendetta: The True Story of the Worst Lynching in America: The Mass Murder of Italian-Americans in 1891, the Vicious Motivations Behind it, and the Tragic Repercussions that Linger to This Day (New York, Doubleday, 1977), which focuses on the New Orleans lynching case referred to in this book; and Michael J. Piore’s Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1979).

  For general studies of immigration and immigrants in Boston, see Roger Daniels’s Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 1990); Herbert J. Gans’s The Urban Villagers (New York, The Free Press, 1962); Oscar Handlin’s Boston Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1941); John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1988); and Stephen Thernstrom’s The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis 1880–1970 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1973).

  Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and Munitions

  Historians and authors have long struggled to interpret and make sense of the ghastly and destructive war that pulled a reluctant United States from the insulation and isolation of the “long nineteenth century,” and thrust it onto the world stage and into the uncertain future of the twentieth century. Similarly, the struggle continues to this day to capture the often tortured complexity of Woodrow Wilson, the man and the president.