by Ed O'Donnell
In 1904, however, with the development of CPR a half century off, the medical personnel did the best they could. Working in pairs, they laid a victim on her back. One worker then stretched the victim’s arms above her head and quickly pulled them down to her side. A second worker pushed on the chest to expel the water. After a few rounds of this method, they then placed the victim face first over the rounded side of a barrel and pushed on her back to force more water out. On the beach at North Brother Island, there were no barrels at first, so as one nurse explained, “We rolled them over our knees.” When these efforts failed—in most cases they did unless the victim had lost consciousness only moments earlier—some resorted to other traditional methods for reviving the unconscious, like vigorous rubbing of the palms, slapping the face, or pouring whiskey into their mouths. Here and there a victim vomited up seawater and opened their eyes, but most stayed on their course toward death.
Reverend Haas was one of the exceptions. He was unconscious when delivered to the beach, most likely from shock rather than drowning. Around him five medical personnel, perhaps aware of who he was, worked feverishly to revive him. Eventually his eyes fluttered and he came to. As soon as he could speak, he asked the question being heard up and down the beach that morning. “Where are they?” he asked with pleading eyes. “Where is my family? Are they saved? Are they dead or alive?” He received the same answer: no one could say.
By 10:45 A.M., approximately twenty minutes after the Slocum ran ashore, the medical personnel of Riverside Hospital ceased their efforts to revive any of the victims. Even with their limited knowledge of the dynamics of drowning, they knew that time had run out. Now they directed their efforts to caring for the survivors, providing everything from warm blankets and whiskey to stitches and bandages. There was no emergency medicine theory of triage in 1904, but hospital personnel made similar judgments on instinct. Serious burn victims and those in shock received first priority, those with deep lacerations and broken bones came next, followed by all the rest. As is common in similar disaster incidents, many of those treated were so traumatized by their experience, they failed to notice their injuries until they were pointed out by the doctors and nurses.
Fortunately, the first boatloads of emergency personnel had already begun to arrive. Lulu McGibbon’s calls to the city’s hospitals had prompted hundreds of nurses and dozens of doctors to race for the docks along the Bronx shore to board boats for the island. Dr. J. C. Ayre and two other physicians at Bellevue Hospital downtown filled an automobile with medical supplies and roared up First Avenue, followed by two ambulances carrying several more doctors. Dr. Henry Krauskopf of nearby Harlem Hospital, one of the first doctors to reach the island, was simply overwhelmed by what he saw. “There were children all about us lying dead on the grass,” he remembered, and scores of injured parents, many running about screaming for their missing kin. “In the three hours that we were on the island I think we must have treated fully 150 persons.”
Arriving at just about the same time were City Health Commissioner Thomas Darlington, Coroner William O’Gorman, Police Inspector Albertson, and Commissioner of the Fire Department Edward Croker. Together they worked to bring some order to the myriad activity swirling about them. Albertson posted three hundred policemen about the island and instructed them to maintain order and provide any needed help. Darlington saw to it that the medical personnel were properly supplied with blankets, bandages, and whiskey. He also personally assisted some of the injured, at one point helping a seventeen-year-old girl. She handed him a small package, asked him to give it to her mother, and promptly died in his arms. “I will never be able to forget the scene,” he recalled, “the utter horror of it.”
One of the largest tasks, the handling of the dead, fell to Coroner O’Gorman. He quickly organized the retrieval of bodies from the water, hiring on the spot many of the boatmen who originally came to rescue survivors. Then he instructed teams of hospital workers and volunteers to bring the bodies from the beach to the lawn in front of the hospital. There, men from his office tagged each body with a number and placed any personal effects in a bag marked with a corresponding number. “No. 64. Woman. One gold watch” was a typical notation. In anticipation of the bloating and discoloration that sets in soon after drowning, O’Gorman also had workers examine each body and record distinguishing physical characteristics such as birthmarks or scars.
Several priests also stepped off boats and went to work. Fathers Donlin of St. Jerome’s Church and Boyle and Christian of St. Luke’s Church moved from victim to victim administering the Catholic sacrament of extreme unction, or last rites. Neither they nor anyone around them seemed to mind that most of the victims were Lutherans.
Also on the scene was Martin Green’s force of a dozen reporters and photographers. By virtue of a chance phone call from an eyewitness and some sage advice from Eugene F. Moran, head of the Moran Towing Company, the World ’s staff had arrived there first. The reporters and photographers realized this the moment they stepped off their boat, for they saw none of their colleagues from rival papers. None yet, anyway, for they knew that a story this big had already reached the newsrooms of the other dailies and legions of reporters were on their way. They would have to move quickly to get the first reports phoned in to fill the columns of the Extra! being prepared downtown.
The newsmen fanned out in all directions and began interviewing survivors. Most were too stunned by their experiences to take offense at the probing questions. Indeed, many seemed to welcome the opportunity to relate their story, as if the telling would make it more comprehensible, or perhaps release some of the horror flooding their minds. They poured out details faster than reporters could scribble.
Other reporters found nurses and rescue personnel and quickly transcribed the stories of heroism and quick thinking that saved so many. Pho tographers lugged their enormous rigs from one end of the beach to the other, pausing every so often to set up a shot of a dozen bodies lying in the water, a few survivors huddled under blankets, or the smoldering wreck of the Slocum. No matter how many crime scenes they had photographed in the past, none could quite believe the things they saw when they peered into the viewfinder.
Downtown at the offices of the World, Martin Green waited for the telephone to ring. Outside his office and far below in City Hall Park and along Newspaper Row, he could see people talking excitedly, obviously exchanging fragments of fact and rumor about the disaster far uptown. They would be among the first to plunk down a penny when his first Extra! hit the sidewalks. The men downstairs were poised to produce it; all they needed was copy dictated over the phone lines. The photographs, which had to be brought back to the office and developed, would be included in subsequent Extra! numbers.
Finally the telephone rang and Green took the first reports of the Slocum disaster down in furious shorthand. This was worse—far worse— than the St. Louis tornado or the Hoboken pier fire, and it was dreadful stuff to transcribe. But Green had been handed a scoop and he had a job to do: deliver the story. In thirty minutes he’d have his Extra! rolling off the presses.
As soon as he was able to stand, Reverend Haas hobbled over to the rows of the dead laid out on the grass. By now workers from the coroner’s office, health department, and Riverside Hospital had pulled dozens of the dead up over the seawall and laid them out in neat rows on the grass. The sight sickened him. There under the warm midday sun lay scores of corpses, among them, he feared, his wife, daughter, and sister. As he approached the rows he saw victims in every state. Some of the dead were badly burned and disfigured, but most were not, the great majority dying by drowning. Some had contorted limbs and faces, suggesting they died struggling to the last. Others lay on the grass, hands folded on their chests, as though they’d died peacefully in their sleep. He saw several mothers with children still clasped tightly to their breasts. His missing family members, however, were nowhere to be seen.
Joining Haas in the dreadful viewing were survivors of all ages sear
ching for loved ones. Some moved slowly, as if in a trance, while others raced about in a state of unbridled hysteria. Instinctually they turned to Haas, and he did his best to offer some measure of comfort. To those still searching, he gave words of encouragement and hope. To those bent over the bodies of loved ones, he offered prayers and consolation. It was something he’d done countless times for families in his parish when a loved one died, but this was different—not simply due to the scale of the tragedy, but also because he was directly involved. For the first time in his career, Haas received consoling words from his flock.
In a strange, subconscious way, the hideous process of searching among the dead actually boosted some of the searchers’ hopes. They were engaged in a strange undertaking—a search in which they hoped not to find what they were looking for. Every corpse that turned out to be someone else’s wife or child raised the prospect that theirs had been spared. As one journalist put it, “As a face was uncovered and the sheet turned back upon it, there was renewed hope that after all those sought might be saved, or at worst were only suffering in one or another hospitals.” Adding to these slim hopes were the stories flying among the survivors, stories of relatives last seen climbing aboard tugboats or floating with life preservers. And everywhere, it seemed, people flung their arms around each other, indicating a miraculous reunion of people separated during the fire. The searchers clung to these images as they looked over the dead, hoping all the while not to find the irrefutable evidence that trumped all alleged eyewitness accounts of rescues—the body of a loved one.
But even those who failed to find the remains of a loved one were nonetheless traumatized by the process of seeing so many corpses. They saw countless people they knew, in some cases whole families. No one was more affected in this way than Haas, for most of these people were members of his parish family. He’d baptized, confirmed, and married most of them. In one row lay Mrs. Schwartz and her mother. In another was Amelia Richter, flanked by several of her dead children. Not far away lay several more mothers—Louisa Hartung, Emilia Justh, Johanna Horway, and many more. There was a woman who looked like Mary Abendschein—the tireless Sunday school teacher who had handled every detail in planning the excursion. There was Henry Schnude, a deacon of St. Mark’s, and George Maurer, leader of the band aboard the Slocum. And everywhere, babies and little children too numerous to count or name.
Nearly as haunting were the sounds of despair emanating from the rows of dead as their fellow victims recognized a wife, mother, or child. Some of the hardest scenes to witness were those involving children who found their dead mothers and fathers. Too young to comprehend what had happened, and the finality of death, they shook their mothers and pleaded, “Mama, wake up.”
Despite his injuries, including severely burned hands, Haas remained among the rows of dead all afternoon, searching for his family and comforting the survivors. At one point he even ventured out in a boat to help recover additional bodies, but soon returned. Nurses and doctors tried to persuade him to get medical attention, but he refused. His flock had been devastated and he simply could not bring himself to abandon them. It was late in the afternoon when he finally collapsed from exhaustion and shock and was taken from the island, placed in an ambulance, and brought to Lincoln Hospital and later home to Little Germany.
Anna Liebenow sat on the beach with her baby Adella wrapped in a blanket. Badly burned on her left side and arm from shielding her baby from the flames before jumping onto a tugboat, she stared out into the water. She was all alone except for the baby. Her husband and two older daughters were nowhere to be seen, nor were her in-laws, the Webers, and their two children. The horrific scene in the water and the growing lines of dead on the lawn, especially the children, filled her heart with dread. Were they all gone?
Suddenly a wild-eyed woman rushed up to her, claiming that the baby she held was hers. In spite of her state of shock, Liebenow had the presence of mind to ask, “What sex is your baby?” “A boy,” the woman replied. As Liebenow explained that her baby was a girl, the crazed woman ran off to continue her fruitless search.
Gradually Liebenow’s husband Paul found her, followed by her in-laws Frank and Annie Weber. They cried and hugged and examined each other’s cuts and burns. It was a bitter reunion, for as glad as they were to find one another, their combined stories pointed to one terrible reality: the children were gone. They still held out hope that Aunt Martha had managed to put them on a tugboat that landed elsewhere, but it seemed so unlikely. The last time they had been seen they were heading down the very stairs that moments later filled with fire and smoke. Still, it was a big boat and anything was possible. The men set out to find their children.
Catherine Gallagher was brought to the island by one of the tugboats. Suffering from minor burns and bruises, she sat on the grass in a state of hysteria. She remembered there’d been a fire and that in the ensuing confusion she’d lost sight of her mother and two siblings. She also had a vague recollection that someone had put her over the side into a passing tugboat. Now as she sat there wrapped in a blanket and looking around at the tumult among the survivors and rescue workers, she saw no sign of her family. Eventually, probably at the urging of a rescue worker, she took the first of several tours of the dead. Each time she found nothing, but the steady arrival of bodies from the beach left her no option but to wait.
At 10:55 A.M., even before the news of the disaster became general, the burning hulk that had been the General Slocum was raised by the incoming tide and set adrift. The floating inferno presented an enormous risk to traffic on the East River and the busy piers that lined its banks. So as it cleared the rocky shoals surrounding the island and drifted out into the channel, several tugs secured lines to the hull and towed it east to Hunts Point on the Bronx shore. Her entire upper works still ablaze, the Slocum began to sink as it approached the shore, weighed down by thousands of gallons of seawater pumped into it by the fireboats. Wallowing along and listing to one side, the crippled vessel began to pitch forward and then rolled on her port side about 250 feet from shore. Huge clouds of steam from the extinguished flames shot into the air, briefly obscuring the wreck. Steam and smoke continued to billow as the Slocum slowly sank to the mud floor below. By approximately 12:20 P.M., only the starboard paddle box, some of the upper works, and the smokestacks could be seen, shrouded in an eerie mix of smoke and steam.
At North Brother Island, rescuers-turned-recoverers found that the moving of the Slocum had stirred the waters and freed dozens more victims from the bottom. Men like Sam Berg, police officer John Scheuing, and young Charles Schwartz, who had saved so many victims, now worked among the dozens of men moving about in small boats and armed with grappling hooks to pull in the dead. As soon as their boats were full, they brought their dismal cargo to tugboats, which then transported the bodies to the island, landing them at a pier. As time passed, many resorted to simply towing the dead to the tugs, a move that saved time and lessened the chances of capsizing. The bodies brought in by this method cut irregular paths in the thick layer of cork dust that covered large areas of the water’s surface.
Yet by 11:30 A.M., an hour after the beaching and with smoke from the Slocum still visible to the northeast, the retrieval of the dead slowed to a near standstill. On the island’s beach and lawn lay about 150 dead. As the hours ticked by into the midafternoon with only an occasional corpse being found, it seemed to many that the worst was over. Perhaps, workers and officials thought, the death toll might not exceed 200, a ghastly tally to be sure, but far less than many had predicted given the early accounts of the disaster.
Gradually, rescue workers and medical personnel began to transfer the survivors off North Brother Island aboard the city-owned tugs Massasoit and Franklin Edson. Since Riverside Hospital was dedicated solely to the treatment of contagious diseases, officials decided to send those in need of further medical attention to several nearby hospitals. Most were taken across the river to the pier at 138th Street and transferred to a
mbulances for the ride to either Lincoln or Lebanon Hospital in the Bronx or Harlem Hospital in upper Manhattan, while others went directly by tug downriver to Bellevue Hospital at East 26th Street.
Also sent off the island were survivors who had few or no injuries. Many were eager to leave the island so they could notify family members and look for loved ones at hospitals, the police station, and the morgue. In a manner shocking to modern sensibilities concerning the psychological effects of trauma and tragedy, officials simply put them on trains headed downtown. Some children were escorted by policemen or transported home in a police wagon, but many were delivered to the train platform and sent home unescorted. It may have been due to the sheer number of people involved and the general atmosphere of confusion, but it also reflected the spirit of the age. Americans in 1904 thought no more of “grief counseling” than they did computer programming. Home—to the consolation of family, neighborhood, and church—was where these victims needed to be, and so off they went. Commuters on the trains could not help but notice these poor people wrapped in bandages and dressed in ill-fitting clothes provided by the hospital. Few were perplexed by the strange sight, for by now everyone in the city knew of the tragedy.
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