Ship Ablaze

by Ed O'Donnell

  Word of the Slocum disaster spread with astonishing speed, even by New York City standards. Sometime around 11:30 A.M., barely one hour after the Slocum hit the beach all aflame, the doors leading to the loading docks behind the New York World building flung open. Dozens of men began hastily hurling bundles of newspapers onto the beds of trucks for delivery to uptown newsstands. At least a hundred young boys—“newsies” in the street slang of the day—jockeyed for position near a dispatch office. They pushed and shoved each other, eager to plunk down their meager cash—fifty cents for a hundred copies to sell at one penny each— and be on their way to every busy street corner in the city to hawk their Extras! telling the first details of the great disaster on the East River.

  In the great race to be first, Martin Green had won.

  Twenty minutes later a woman staggered off a streetcar at East Sixth Street. Weeping audibly and holding a rumpled copy of a World Extra!, she ran to St. Mark’s Church halfway down the block. Some bystanders recognized her as a parishioner at St. Mark’s and they stared as she flew by, wondering what could bring on such an undignified display of emotion. They watched as she reached the church and began pulling the door handles and knocking violently with her fists. But with more than half the parish away on the Sunday school excursion, this was one of the very rare days when the church doors were locked. She collapsed in a heap on the stairs, crying hysterically. A small crowd gathered to see what was the matter. Unable to speak coherently, she handed them the newspaper. And in the time it took to read the extra-large-font headlines, “Horror on the East River! Hundreds Feared Dead!” the neighborhood began to learn the news of the unthinkable.

  At almost the same moment, George Haas, Jr., son of the pastor, heard the telephone ring. Now nineteen, he’d decided to skip this year’s church excursion and was enjoying a quiet day at home. Normally on a spring weekday he could expect a relatively uneventful day, little more than answering a few phone calls and accepting a delivery or two. Nothing seemed unusual about this call, until the quaking voice on the other end began to speak.

  It was a member of the parish, and in a torrent of anguished words the caller told him what had happened. There has been a terrible tragedy—a fire on board the steamboat. Hundreds have drowned or died in the flames—women, children, and grandparents. It’s horrifying. And your family—your father, mother, sister, grandmother, and aunts—they are all gone.

  Haas stammered out a few questions and listened to the dreadful details of the ordeal before the caller hung up. Could it possibly be true? he wondered. His father’s parish wiped out in a fire aboard the Slocum? His entire family gone? A frantic knock at the door brought the answer. Still reeling from the news, Haas opened the door and found several parishioners standing in the doorway with tears in their eyes and looks of anguish on their faces. All at once they poured out a volley of frantic questions— Did you hear? What happened? How many have died? Where should we go? Haas just stood there in a state of shock, unable to speak.

  Alarge crowd of distraught parishioners had by now gathered in front of St. Mark’s Church. They grew more hysterical with each passing minute, their fears stoked by the bits and pieces of rumor and fact being bandied about. One woman urged everyone to stay calm—It’s nothing more than typical Pulitzer-Hearst exaggeration, she said. “I’ve just heard from someone who was on board,” she continued, “that there wasn’t a single life lost.” Everyone got off safely, she insisted, after the captain beached the boat.

  Her words of assurance briefly calmed the crowd. But only a few minutes later, the first hard evidence that countless friends and family were gone appeared in the form of survivors returning home. Among the first to arrive was a young boy named Edwin Matzerath of 330 East Sixth Street. They gathered round the youth, noting his bruised head and singed clothing. In a halting voice he told them about the fire, the panic, and the hundreds who plunged into the water. Many, he told them, had been burned to death or drowned. At this the crowd disintegrated into panic and cries of anguish. Soon twelve-year-old Fred Baumler, also of East Sixth Street, arrived. Likewise battered and bruised, he told a nearly identical version of the tragedy. He’d come home in search of his family—had anyone seen his mother, brother, and two sisters?

  With the arrival of irrefutable evidence of a massive tragedy, word spread rapidly throughout the neighborhood. Helping the process along was the arrival of an army of newsies bearing fresh Extras! containing the latest details. Friends and relatives dashed from stores to apartments to street corners telling everyone they knew the news. People poured out of their homes and businesses onto the sidewalks and into the streets. Many later recounted what it was like to learn of the Slocum’s fate.

  Eugene Ansel sat weeping in his deli at 103 East Fourth Street. He thought his heart was about to break, for he’d just received a telegram from Germany informing him that his father had died. It was the sort of news that hit immigrants harder than others, for it stoked feelings of guilt over leaving their family and country behind for a new life in America. It had been years since he’d seen his father, and now he never would again. And on this day, he had no one in his immediate family to console him, for that morning he’d put his wife and two sons aboard the Slocum.

  Not five minutes after the telegram boy had sped off on his bicycle, a friend burst into the store. Seeing Ansel’s tears, he assumed he’d heard about the disaster and began ranting about the horror of it all and asking if Ansel had any information. Ansel, of course, had no idea what his friend was talking about, and it was several minutes before he gleaned the awful truth about the Slocum.

  Peter Fickbaum stood behind the big wooden bar in his saloon at Avenue D and East Eighth Street. Earlier that morning he’d put his wife, four children, and a servant on board the Slocum, and now, as he prepared for the midday lunch crowd, he chatted amiably with a few regulars sipping their midmorning lager.

  The peaceful atmosphere was suddenly shattered when his friend Nicholas Balser stumbled into the saloon. His clothes still wet and his hands and face red and blistered, he presented a bizarre sight.

  “What’s the matter?” asked an anxious Fickbaum. Balser and his wife Catherine had accompanied the Fickbaums on the Slocum excursion.

  “They’re lost—,” he gasped, “burned—all gone.” Then, before anyone had time to make sense of what he’d said, Balser gave an animated description of the fire. Hundreds had perished in the flames or in the water, including, he feared, Fickbaum’s family. “My Catherine!” he repeated over and over again as men all around him slammed down their steins of beer and dashed out into the street.

  Mayor McClellan was at his desk in city hall when his personal secretary John O’Brien ran into his office with news of the disaster. A steamboat had burst into flames on the East River and as many as one hun dred people were dead. The startled mayor composed himself, picked up the phone, and dialed Police Commissioner William McAdoo. The two were increasingly at odds and rarely spoke directly with each other, but this was not a time for pettiness. He listened in astonishment as McAdoo confirmed the story of the fire, but upped the death toll considerably. Hundreds have perished, the commissioner predicted, perhaps more than five hundred. The mayor could hardly believe it—a blaze to rival Chicago’s Iroquois Theater fire back in December. He empowered McAdoo to order up from the appropriate city departments as many medical personnel, ambulances, fire apparatus, and boats he needed. Keep me informed, McClellan said before hanging up.

  THE FIX

  From the moment the first survivors came ashore at North Brother Island, accusations of negligence and dereliction of duty began to fly. Rescue workers, nurses, and journalists heard the same stories over and over again. The boat, claimed the passengers, went up in flames like a paper box. The crew panicked and did nothing to fight the fire or help pas sengers in need. The hoses and life preservers were rotten and the lifeboats were wired in place. And the captain, they all seemed to ask, why did he not bring the boat to shor
e sooner?

  Coronor O’Gorman heard their charges against the crew and concern ing the safety provisions aboard the Slocum and quietly began collecting evidence even as he labored to assist in rescue and recovery work. Save anything you find that might aid in a future investigation, he instructed his men. They didn’t have far to look, and by midday he had a stack of water logged life preservers—or at least shreds of them.

  It was over an hour after the steamboat’s grounding before Inspector Albertson received orders from McAdoo to consider the incident a possible crime. He was to arrest the captain and any crewmen he encountered on the charge of criminal negligence. Several police officers fanned out to make the collars, but they could not locate the wanted men. Several rescue workers pointed out a nearby tree, indicating that the captain lay there recovering after coming ashore. But neither he nor Brandow, Coakley, Conklin, Corcoran, Flanagan, O’Neill, Van Wart, or Weaver was anywhere to be seen.

  The man responsible for these mysterious disappearances was none other than Frank A. Barnaby, president of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company. A hard-nosed businessman with excellent instincts, he immediately appreciated the threat posed to his business interests by the Slocum disaster.

  Gone were the days of the Gilded Age when a businessman could say, as Vanderbilt once famously did, “The public be damned!” Public opinion in the Progressive Era mattered a great deal. How else to explain the sensations created by muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens? Barnaby knew that Hearst, Pulitzer, McClure, and Frank A. Munsey (publisher of Munsey’s magazine) delighted in (and grew rich by) playing the populist crusader role against evil capitalists. Bad publicity was bad for business. If he failed to act quickly, his reputation would suffer and so would his business interests—a substantial real estate enterprise far more important to him than the piddling, two-boat Knickerbocker Steamboat Company. This he knew from firsthand experience, having been convicted of fraud in a real estate deal five years earlier.

  So even before he learned of the growing howl of outrage among the survivors and officials at North Brother Island, the shrewd capitalist set in motion a scheme to contain and perhaps even stymie any effort to bring legal action against him or the company. Accordingly, he dispatched James K. Atkinson, secretary of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company, and five other men to the scene. To the press, he would explain that they were being sent to offer any and all assistance to the suffering. But to Atkinson and his men, he described their task in more narrow and cold terms. First, find the captain and crew and get them out of there before the press and police have at them. Send them downtown to the company headquarters. They would need to get their stories straight. Second, learn as much as possible about the incident, the condition of the steamer, and what survivors were saying. The earlier he knew this information, the sooner he could rebut any accusations of negligence.

  Twenty minutes later, Atkinson and his men set foot on North Brother Island and went to work taking stock of the situation and rounding up the captain and crew. They found First Mate Flanagan, Second Mate Corcoran, porter Payne, engineer Conklin, and deckhands Coakley, Collins, and O’Neill almost immediately and got them onto boats leaving the island before the police began their roundup. Subsequently they located Van Schaick, Van Wart, Weaver, and four other crewmen and likewise spirited them onto departing boats. This second group made it as far as the 138th Street pier and was about to slip away in a cab when a policeman approached and ordered them to halt. He placed them under arrest and sent them to the Alexander Avenue police station. But Barnaby’s plan had not failed entirely—Atkinson’s effort had impressed upon the arrested men the gravity of the situation and the need to remain unified and tight-lipped.

  Downtown, Barnaby—unaware that only part of his scheme had worked—was already at work on another crucial element of damage control. He called in Miss Josephine Hall, the company’s bookkeeper, and informed her that some honest mistakes had been made in some recent records regarding the purchase of safety equipment for the General Slocum. It was nothing major, he assured her, nothing that could not be handled with a little erasing acid (the 1904 equivalent of Wite-Out). She should see to it right away.

  A few hours later, once Barnaby had time to read the newspapers and speak with Atkinson and the six crewmen of the Slocum who had made it to the office, he drew up a statement and issued it to the press. Faced with severe public criticism of his vessel and its crew, Barnaby opted for a full and complete denial, leavened with a few thinly veiled accusations of his own.

  We do not feel that our employees are responsible for the disaster since their discipline was perfect, and one minute after the fire started every man was at his post. We have frequent fire and boat drills aboard, and each man acted as he had been instructed….

  The fire, I learn, started right up in the bow. Someone had placed a bunch of bananas there and had covered it with dry meadow grass. As soon as the blaze was discovered in it the hose was stretched and within a minute the water was started….

  I believe that Capt. Van Schaick did all in his power to save passengers, and will back him in whatever course he pursued.

  The Slocum was fully supplied with all life-saving devices and I cannot understand why the passengers did not avail themselves of them. At the vessel’s recent inspection we were told that she could safely remove all of the passengers she was licensed to carry.

  In just a few lines of text, Barnaby set forth the company’s strategy for the coming legal battle. It rejected any suggestion that the crew failed in its duties and that the captain used poor judgment in heading for North Brother Island. Further, it denied that the boat’s safety equipment and emergency training were inadequate. More important, Barnaby tried to shift blame from the company to the passengers. Someone—i.e., a passenger—had started the fire by placing bananas and grass in the bow. Then, when the fire raged out of control, the passengers did not avail themselves—i.e., they panicked—of the ample life preservers and boats aboard. In this latter point, Barnaby sought to play the gender card, suggesting the whole fiasco had been caused by hysterical passengers, most of whom were women. The next day in a subsequent statement of denial, he made this point more explicit. “A hundred failed in doing what a single man could have done.”

  Not far from Barnaby’s office, about half a mile down Broadway at 17 Battery Place, officials of the United States Steamboat Inspection Service had commenced their own scramble for cover. The man in charge of the USSIS’s Second District (which covered the East Coast of the United States from Virginia to the Canadian border) was Robert S. Rodie. The forty-three-year-old was a classic self-made man—of the bureaucrat sort. After a brief stint in the private sector as a clerk in the Pennsylvania Railroad’s marine division, Rodie secured a position as assistant supervising inspector of steam-powered vessels in New York. By 1901 he’d risen to his current position as supervising inspector of the Second District. Given the nature of the USSIS, he was perfectly suited for the job. He was fiercely loyal to the service and resistant to any attempt at reform. And one additional thing made him ideal as head of the Second District office: he had absolutely no training in the design and workings of steamboats. Like Lundberg, he’d become an “inspector” merely by watching other “inspectors.”

  Assisting Rodie in overseeing the district were two deputies, Gen. James A. Dumont and Thomas H. Barrett. Like their boss, they were classic placeholders, only with decades of bureaucratic service behind them. Dumont, inspector of hulls, was eighty-five years old and had spent nearly three decades with the service. Barrett, the inspector of boilers, was seventy years old and had been with the USSIS for the past fifteen years. Despite their titles, neither man did any actual inspections. They rarely left the office and mainly occupied themselves with signing certificates of approval based on work carried out by assistant inspectors like Lundberg and Fleming. Both men had signed the certificate attesting to the seaworthiness and safety of the Slocum back in May.

&nb
sp; Dumont had actually held the top position in the USSIS of supervising inspector general in Washington, D.C., until March 1903, when he resigned under pressure from the secretary of Commerce and Labor. No one in the service seemed to think it odd when Dumont took the inspector of hulls job in New York—just the thing for a man with “experience” and a desire for light work.

  All three men shared a desire to protect the USSIS from the scourge of the era—the good-government reformer. Unfortunately, Dumont’s replacement, George Uhler, was one such man. From the start he proved distressingly keen on revamping the service and had already made waves the previous year when he noted in his annual report the permissive culture within the USSIS that allowed most fines for violations to be reduced or waived altogether.

  Of course, Uhler’s scrupulous attention to the most minute details also meant that he provided the seasoned men in the field with endless laughs. On one occasion he demanded that Rodie repay the service five cents for overstating the reimbursable mileage for a trip. The distance from Albany, New York, to Portland, Maine, he testily informed Rodie, was not 281miles, but 280. On another, he upbraided an official for discussing two separate matters in one letter. “Hereafter,” he insisted, “you will confine each letter to one subject.”

  Still, a man of Uhler’s position was not to be taken lightly. It was already well known that Congress was contemplating tougher inspection laws, and Uhler intended to demand more rigorous enforcement of them by his inspectors. The Slocum disaster threatened to put the spotlight on the service and expose its many flaws—unless Rodie, Dumont, and Barrett acted to contain the controversy.

  As a massive, fossilized bureaucracy, their containment effort would be less nimble than Barnaby’s, but then again their task was somewhat smaller: find Lundberg and Fleming, the USSIS men who had inspected and certified as safe the Slocum five weeks earlier. Lundberg in particular would have to prepare for the onslaught of questions from the media and eventually investigators from the coroner’s or district attorney’s offices. If he exposed the service for what it was—a corrupt patronage mill that had long before lost focus on assuring the safety of steamboats—he might go to jail. Or worse, Rodie, Barrett, Dumont, and countless others in the service might lose their sinecures in a general housecleaning.