by Ed O'Donnell
Given the unique setting and the speed with which the flames moved, it took almost no time for a full-scale panic to develop aboard the Slocum. “There was a rush away from the spot from which the smoke came,” recalled John Holthusen. “Screams of women and cries of children rent the air. Men began to shout and there were cries of ‘keep cool,’ ‘where are the lifeboats?’ ‘don’t crowd,’ etc., but I doubt if many heard them.”
They didn’t. No amount of leadership and pleading, not even from Haas, a man so many loved, trusted, and respected, could stop the crowd’s descent toward demoralization. “A panic that has seized on a few sheep,” wrote Le Bon, “will soon extend to the whole flock.” So it was on the Slocum that morning—and the shepherd was powerless to stop it.
Haas pressed on through the retreating crowd like a salmon swimming upstream, refusing to surrender hope that the disaster could be averted. Up ahead just beyond the crowd he could see the flames now, moving with astonishing speed through the main cabin of the promenade deck. If he could close the large side-by-side doors of the cabin, it would slow the fire’s progress and shield the mass of passengers crammed on the stern until the captain brought the boat to shore. Haas struggled forward through the retreating crowd, still preaching calm, until he reached the doors. They were hot to the touch and the fire was only feet away. Smoke stung his eyes and throat as he quickly closed the right-hand door. The left-hand door, however, jammed—probably due to the heat, which swelled the wood and turned to glue its several coats of paint and varnish. As the fire ate into his fingers and sparks singed his face, Haas poured every ounce of strength he had into it, but still the door refused to budge. He shook and kicked it. Please God, he prayed, give me the strength. But it was no use.
Standing a few feet away, John Holthusen watched in amazement. His friend was, he recalled, “surrounded by flames” and still struggling with the door. And when he lost sight of him a few seconds later in a cloud of smoke, he felt certain Haas had died.
Haas, as it turned out, was badly burned but still alive. Unable to withstand the flames, he reluctantly retreated to the railing in search of his fam ily. He found them pinned to the railing amid a scene of sheer terror and panic. A steady flow of frantic passengers pressed toward the boat’s stern. “Women were shrieking and clasping their children in their arms,” Haas remembered. We need to get on the other side of the railing, he told his wife and daughter, otherwise we’ll be crushed to death. One by one he helped them over, and then he followed. There was nothing left for him to do but pray and wait—for what he did not know.
Order rapidly broke down throughout the vessel as panic spread to every quarter. Some passengers, as is common in panic situations, stood paralyzed by fear, frozen in one place, shouting for their spouses, children, and relatives. Fourteen-year-old William McGaffney came across a girl about his age in this catatonic state. She made no attempt to save herself and stood silently, twisting the ends of her necktie. McGaffney picked her up and threw her onto an approaching tugboat.
Most, however, recalled Bernard Miller, “acted as though they had lost their minds.” Panic quickly reached the demoralization stage and packs of fear-crazed passengers raced from one side of the steamer to find loved ones and refuge. Seeking order and safety, they created chaos and hazard. And as Kate Kassenbaum and others in the minority who remained levelheaded discovered, they were at the mercy of the panicked majority. Kassenbaum had kept her cool when the panic started and managed to gather her family of ten along a railing. Hang on for as long as possible, she quietly urged them, and stick together. “But my words of warning were not more than out of my mouth,” she recalled, “when there came such a rush of panic-stricken and frenzied people to the stern of the boat that no human being could have stood up against it.” She closed her eyes and hung on as they crashed into them. When she opened her eyes she was all alone. “Not one of my family was to be seen anywhere. They had been whisked away from me in the mad rush.”
Kassenbaum could at least cling to the hope that she’d find them again. But many other passengers suffered a far worse fate at the hands of the mob. Demoralized by panic and propelled by collective momentum, it stampeded anything in its path. Fainting women, slow-moving grandparents, and scores of small children were simply crushed to death. Many survivors would be forever haunted by the memory of having trampled, however unwillingly, innocent people caught underfoot. Most never noticed.
Although warped by fear, their minds were nonetheless fixated on a clear and rational goal: to get away from the flames and into a life preserver or lifeboat. Most of the passengers—like the great majority of Americans in 1904—did not know how to swim. They were city people, and were too busy and too poor to learn. Even if they had the time and money, where would they go to swim? The city had only a handful of public pools, and the crowds they attracted limited swims to a mere fifteen minutes a day. Up until this very moment, swimming had seemed about as necessary as piano lessons.
Paul Liebenow, unable to find his children and now separated from his brother-in-law, decided to return to their wives with a few life preservers. That way at least they and the baby would have a chance to survive. There were some twenty-five hundred life preservers on board, stowed throughout the boat in clusters suspended from the ceiling by wire mesh. Many hung more than eight feet above the deck. Liebenow saw crowds gathered beneath them, their arms stretched upward reaching like Tantalus, grasping futilely for their only hope of survival. Young boys shimmied up pipes and men boosted each other upward to jerk the wire mesh loose. Liebenow found a cluster he could reach, but to his horror discovered that the wire holding them in place refused to give. The rusted wire sliced into his fingers as he fought to free them. Finally, with blood running down his arms, he yanked once more and the life preservers fell to the deck with a thud.
In most cases the lifejackets cascaded down upon the desperate people below, touching off a frenzied, Darwinian struggle among the thoroughly demoralized crowd. Gone, it seemed, were the good Christian people of St. Mark’s parish, Sunday school teachers, church sextons and ushers, members of the choir and Luther League. In their place were savage individuals capable of unspeakable acts of violence and cruelty. “Mothers who had started side by side with an endless fund of sympathy for domestic difficulties,” wrote one journalist, “were fighting like wild beasts.” Many had their babies torn from their arms in the struggle. Frieda Gardner, still terrified that her mother would discover that she’d gone on the trip against her wishes, was pounced upon by a woman who ripped her life preserver off. Similarly, men with an equally vast fund of sympathy for late-Victorian ideals of chivalry and manliness, punched and kicked women and children. One man desperate for a place along the railing sank his teeth into a woman’s hand until she jumped.
The agony of the bitter struggles for life preservers was quickly compounded when the passengers found, much to their horror, that most of the life preservers were worthless. Their canvas coverings long since deteriorated over thirteen seasons of sun, salt, and sea, they ripped open like paper sacks. “As fast as anyone tried to use them they would burst open,” recalled William Vassner, “or the straps would come off.”
Out of the tattered life preservers spilled useless gray matter—oncesolid chunks of cork that had long since disintegrated into fine dust. It blinded many as it cascaded down from the racks above and littered the decks below. Some of it poured over the sides of the boat into the water, or ended up there when the defective life preservers burst on impact. “The powdered cork from the life preservers was so thick [in the water],” related one survivor, “that some of us were nearly choked by the stuff.”
Some passengers took off in the hope that usable lifejackets could be found somewhere else. Others simply dropped the tattered remains and jumped. “I tried all six life preservers, and they were all rotten,” remembered one boy. “So I had to jump overboard just as I was.” Fortunately for him, he knew how to swim.
In those s
ections of the steamer where lifejackets were not clawed to pieces or where their flaws were not obvious to the naked eye, passengers dutifully put them on and jumped. Few of them, absorbed as they were with the task of securing lifejackets about themselves and their children, seemed to notice that almost no one who entered the water wearing one ever resurfaced.
With three children to handle, Elizabeth Kircher didn’t notice. She and her two oldest children could swim, but her youngest, seven-year-old Elsie, could not. Thank God, she thought, as she found one of Kahnweiler’s Never-Sink Life Preservers and strapped it on her. She then helped her over the side and waited for her to resurface. She never did. “She had sunk as though a stone were tied to her,” her father bitterly remarked afterward. “The only one lost was the one who wore a life preserver.” The same grim truth applied to the Ottingers. Kate Ottinger herded her four children to the railing and began putting life preservers on them. Her oldest, Willie, refused one, insisting he could swim and urging her to quickly put it on his younger brother. “With that she said something like a prayer,” he remembered, “and then pushed me in the water.” Witnesses later told him his mother and siblings entered the water wearing life preservers and sank like stones.
Over and over the same dreadful scenario was played out. Splash, nothing … Splash, nothing … Splash, nothing.
Only in the aftermath of the disaster did the survivors reach the unthinkable but inescapable conclusion that the rotten lifejackets had actually dragged many straight to the bottom. Unlike solid cork, cork dust has the buoyancy of dirt. Absorbing water on impact, each lifejacket instantly became twenty or more pounds of deadweight—a burden difficult even for an accomplished swimmer to bear for more than a few minutes.
Some of the terrified passengers placed their hopes in the six steel lifeboats and four life rafts on the Slocum’s hurricane deck. The lifeboats were good size—22 feet long by 6 feet wide—and capable of holding twenty or more passengers. Frank Weber found himself in a crowd of men and boys working frantically to free them. Despite their vigorous pulling, the boats barely budged. Realizing that the boats were tied down, some drew out penknives and tried to cut them free. They managed to cut the ropes, but to everyone’s shock and dismay, they discovered they were also held with wire and were immovable. Long ago, it seems, someone had grown tired of the boats rattling about in rough weather and had them meticulously wired in place. In desperation the crowd grabbed the gunwales and tried to rock the boats free. Nothing worked, and with the flames coming at them from all angles, Weber and the rest left the lifeboats and retreated.
Throughout the mounting fury of the fire, many passengers looked to the steamboat’s crew for help and direction. Many of the passengers had never been on a steamboat before today, but they knew to expect assistance from the crew in an emergency. As George Heins later put it, they looked to the crewmen to take control and tell people to remain calm, “the way they do in books.”
But as the fiasco with the fire hoses clearly indicated, the crew of the Slocum was not up to the task. Indeed, almost from the moment the fire broke out they had been part of the panicked masses, distinguishable only by their uniforms. Flanagan and Coakley would later tell grand stories of heroism and self-sacrifice, but witness after witness related a different story. “The deck-hands and crew of the boat were absolutely of no aid in saving lives,” charged Frank Weber. Another offered an even harsher assessment. “The men acted as if they were crazy. They were worse than the women.” At first they refused to offer assistance to the pleading passengers. Then, when confronted by angry crowds, they reluctantly pulled down a few dozen life preservers before disappearing.
One member of the crew who executed his duties flawlessly was Michael McGrann, and he paid the ultimate price as a result. As the boat’s steward, he was in charge of the money, some one thousand dollars in coins and small bills. When word of a fire reached his ears, he knew just what to do. A seasoned veteran, he knew that panic and chaos presented a superb opportunity for a criminal to make some easy money—so much so that criminals in the city often staged fights or shouted fire to allow for easy pocket picking. If he allowed that to happen here, the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company would fire him in a heartbeat—not the sort of thing welcomed by a man with a wife and five young children to support. So he quickly filled a bag with the coins and bills—at least twenty pounds—and donned a life preserver handed to him by a fellow crewman.
Minutes later, now aware that this was no false alarm, McGrann went to the railing, swung his legs over, and jumped. A good swimmer, he probably felt he had little to worry about. But freighted with the Knickerbocker’s precious lucre and no doubt wearing a defective life preserver, he broke the water’s surface like a torpedo, surfaced briefly and called for help, and then disappeared. When in the aftermath of the tragedy the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company was accused of practicing a deadly “criminal economy,” the irony of McGrann’s drowning under the weight of the company’s money would be lost on no one.
Equally dedicated to the end were the engineers down below in the engine room. “The part of the boat where I stood was filled with a dense black smoke,” Conklin later testified. “I was obliged to cover my mouth with my arm in order to breathe.” Conditions were worse where Brandow stood, yet both men remained at their posts until the bitter end. Conklin, not aware that Flanagan and his men had abandoned the fight against the blaze almost as soon as it began, stayed at the steam engine pump to ensure that it was sending water into the standpipe. Brandow manned the steamer’s engine, responding to signals from the pilothouse regarding speed and direction. One tugboat captain, who could tell that at least one engineer was still at his post when the boat hit, told his men he was certain the engineers were lost. Miraculously, both would manage to escape.
The fire, propelled by the forward progress of the steamboat, charged from the forward sections of the vessel toward the stern, filling the decks, stairwells, and interior rooms with thick choking smoke now laced with the sickening smell of burning flesh and hair. Disoriented and unable to see, passengers tumbled down stairs or over railings into the river. Everywhere terrified children ran crying, desperate to find a parent. Sparks and burning embers fell everywhere, setting people on fire. The roar of the fire and crackle of burning wood grew louder, as did the pitiful screams and cries for help. “There are no letters in any language to spell such sounds,” wrote one journalist. “Once heard they are seared upon the memory as with a white-hot iron.”
Cornered by fire or crushed by the crowd, passengers jumped from every corner of the boat. “Twenty would jump at once,” Willie Keppler recounted, “and right on top of ’em twenty more would jump.”
From many places, countless abandoned children were simply thrown overboard. It was a ghastly task made possible only by a rough weighing of cruel probabilities. Those doing the hurling knew that most of the children they put over the railings would drown, but that was better than the alternative. “I would rather see you drown,” one man told a little girl as he put her over the railing, “than burn to death.” And, they told themselves, some might be saved by other passengers in the water or by the many boats now trailing the steamer. So over they went, shrieking for their mothers and clutching the air as they fell into the cold dark water below.
The fate of young children still with their mothers was scarcely better. Desperate mothers, wrote one reporter, “fought like trapped animals to reach the edge of the crowded decks in order that they might give their little ones the more merciful death of drowning.” As they pushed through the crowds clutching their infants and toddlers, they cried out, Can you swim? Please save my baby! Help me I beg you!
A few found saviors, often in the form of young boys and girls who knew how to swim. In some cases, little ones were passed over the heads of the crowd to the railing and handed to a waiting boy or girl, who then jumped. For fourteen-year-old Arthur Link, it happened spontaneously at the railing when he noticed a woman about to
jump with her baby. “If you can’t swim,” he shouted, “give me that baby.” She did and promptly jumped to her death. Link followed and swam the baby to a nearby boat. Twelve-year-old Louise Gailing knew the baby handed to her. She’d come along with the Erklins of Hoboken, New Jersey, as a nanny to care for their young baby. Just before the family jumped, the mother, aware that Louise could swim, handed her the baby. She plunged in with the infant clutched to her chest and then swam with one arm to a nearby boat.
Most mothers, however, found no guardian angels. Or they could not bear the thought of handing their own flesh and blood to a stranger. Some jumped in clutching them to their breasts; others threw them out as far as they could to avoid the paddle wheels and dove in after them. Many mothers put life preservers on their children even when it meant they would have none. “My mother gave me a life preserver, that’s how I got saved,” recounted little Walter Mueller from his hospital bed. “I guess she didn’t have none herself, because they can’t find her.”