Ship Ablaze

by Ed O'Donnell

  As the night wore on, more tugboats arrived bearing additional bodies. No one in the crowd in front of the morgue could see the boats docking, but word of their arrival nonetheless spread quickly, causing renewed chaos. But it was the arrival of the Franklin Edson at 9:00 P.M. that nearly touched off a riot. Many of those who had already toured the rows of the dead once refused to go to the back of the line, which now stretched for blocks. Those who had not yet gained entry protested with equal vehemence that no one should get in ahead of them. Pushing and shoving broke out, and moments later the line disintegrated and the crowd charged the doors. Only with the greatest effort and restraint—they implored the crowd not to make them use of their batons—did the police manage to push them back. The doors slammed shut once again. No one would get in, the police announced, until calm returned. Half an hour later the line was restored and the doors reopened.

  At 11:15 P.M. the tug Minnahannock arrived at the pier with eighty- three additional bodies and word that still more were on the way.

  ARE THERE NO MORE?

  All afternoon and late into the evening the streets of Little Germany pulsed with frantic movement. As word of the disaster spread and became widely known, people poured out of tenements, shops, and factories onto sidewalks seeking more information. Initially there were only rumors, Extras!, and fragmentary evidence provided by the first survivors. But by 1:00 P.M.a few members of St. Mark’s opened an information bureau at the church where relatives could check a list of the injured and killed. More than twenty policemen were on hand to help maintain order along the line and keep an eye out for pickpockets. Reporters were also there, taking detailed notes that would be used to publish lists of the dead, injured, and missing in the papers. It was a grim detail, but far easier than one at the morgue.

  Alone and in clusters the searchers shuffled their way up the stairs and into the church. As one journalist described it:

  Men and women bent with age, tottering weakly on the weary feet that had borne them all night long in constant search at hospital and Morgue, their wrinkled faces blank with misery, their eyes run dry of tears; mothers whose faces were tortured with anguish and little children with wondering fear and terror written on their tear-stained faces, gently jostled one another as they pushed their way to the church door and made their heart-rending inquiries.

  Those who learned the cruel fate of their loved ones from these hastily scrawled ledgers of death made for the morgue. The rest—a majority on the day of the disaster—kept moving in a continuous cycle that took them from St. Mark’s to the morgue, to home, and back again.

  Another stopping point was the elevated train station at East Eighth Street. Nearly all the survivors who returned that day and evening came by this line, and consequently an enormous crowd of several thousand gathered there to keep vigil. As soon as they spied a survivor, distinguished by their bandages and damaged clothing, they crowded around and peppered them with anxious questions about others still missing. Occasionally those who detrained at the station were met by relatives, but most simply answered a few questions and staggered home alone.

  Out of sympathy for those affected by the Slocum disaster, the elevated train company ran a special train for survivors, express to Eighth Street, that arrived toward 8:00 P.M. “My heart went out to the pitiful band limping toward us,” said one policeman on duty. “Some were bandaged; some could barely totter; all seemed at the point of collapse.” Policemen and relatives stepped forward to assist them and in a few minutes the platform was all but empty. All that remained was a crowd of several hundred searchers. “Are there no more?” one of them wailed plaintively. “In God’s name, is that all?”

  All afternoon and long into the night, the neighborhood’s streets vibrated with the incessant rattle of horse-drawn vehicles. Carriages and cabs brought relatives home from work in search of news about their families. Ambulances brought home the injured from the hospital. And everywhere black hearses transported the dead to funeral homes for preparation and then on to the homes of their families.

  One of those who came home in an ambulance was Reverend Haas. Treated for his injuries at Lincoln Hospital, he was released and sent home around 6:00 P.M. His sister Emma, suffering only minor injuries, had arrived hours earlier. The trauma of his experiences in combination with his painful injuries left him agitated and incoherent. Sent straight to bed for rest, he had recovered sufficiently by about 9:00 P.M.His doctor allowed his brother and son to break the news to him: his wife was dead and his daughter still missing. So too were his mother-in-law and sister-in-law and her son. “It is as I feared,” he replied, “and only as I was prepared to hear.”

  To calm the fears of his parishioners over his condition (rumors abounded that he had gone insane and was on the verge of death), his doctor issued a statement. Reverend Haas, it began, has suffered a terrible blow, but is making a rapid recovery. “He is now in full possession of his faculties,” he continued, “and has plans to rejoin the recovery efforts in a few days. The news of his wife’s death and the uncertainty as to his daughter’s fate was broken to him this evening and he bore up as a brave pastor should.”

  His parishioners tried to do the same. Throughout the vicinity of St. Mark’s, they could be seen moving hurriedly between the church morgue, home, and train station. Others huddled on the sidewalks and at corners to exchange news and console one another. Cries of anguish pierced the air as dreaded news reached family after family.

  Some were so overwhelmed by the news, they tried to end their lives. John Woll, whose wife and children were missing and presumed dead, staggered about the streets begging for someone to kill him. Another man tried to kill himself with a butcher knife, but was restrained in time by friends. These and other despondent searchers were brought home by friends and placed under all-night watch. Nonetheless, in the coming months and years at least half a dozen of these men and women would succeed at killing themselves.

  Reporters combed through the neighborhood looking for stories and information for the morning editions. One who had earlier in the evening seen Mrs. Diamond attempt to drown herself in the river, called upon her at home. In the several hours since her suicide attempt, she’d regained her sanity but was still struggling to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster.

  “All of us are gone. Look across the street. There’s a grocery store closed on account of death. Do you see the sign? Look down the block. At the corner of Rivington Street, from one house, six people are dead. Mr. and Mrs. George Gerdes, and their daughter; Mrs. Margaret Fackman and her two little girls—all dead. Next door, at No. 341, Mrs. Meta Hardkopf and her son Henry are gone and Mrs. Kester and her two babies. Up at Mangin and Houston Streets, Mr. Frese, the saloon-keeper, lost his family. Not a block from here, Mrs. Halpmann’s four children are gone. We all knew each other; and now—all dead!”

  Not everyone had given up hope so completely. An old gray-haired man named George Hansen refused to surrender hope that his daughter and granddaughter lived. While others raced about in search of information at the church and morgue, he maintained an all-night vigil at the elevated train station. All day and night he stood on the street below scanning the survivors as they descended the platform in all manner of conditions. None had heard or seen anything of his daughter and granddaughter. Still he kept his eyes fixed “in pitiful expectation” on the stairwell leading down from the platform, hopeful that his persistence would be rewarded. Exhausted, he fell asleep standing against an iron beam for support. Finally at about 3:00 A.M. he awoke to the familiar sound of his granddaughter’s voice—“Look, Mama! Grandpa is waiting for us!” He opened his eyes and promptly fainted.

  By that late hour, recovery efforts at the scene of the disaster had been halted until sunrise. Earlier in the evening, as darkness began to set in, Police Commissioner McAdoo phoned the Metropolitan Street Railway Company to see if they would lend some of their portable flare lamps normally used to assist in emergency repairs made during the night. Wi
thin an hour a boat bearing eight lights docked at North Brother Island. These were quickly set up and soon the main section of the beach was suddenly flooded in an eerie blue light, giving the proceedings there a surreal and haunting quality. “It was a ghostly and unreal scene,” one witness reported, “… the sputtering arc lights cast a weird glow and I shall never forget the dripping swimmers stumbling out of the water bearing limp burdens in their arms.” Nearly seven years later these very same lights would be used to illuminate the scene of the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911.

  Diving at the Slocum wreck was suspended at 11:00 P.M., but the men in boats patrolling the waters near North Brother Island continued through the night. Searchlights from patrol boats swept back and forth across the waters. Every now and again the sighting of a body or two encouraged them to press on.

  At about 2:00 A.M., with the remaining workers on North Brother Island nearly faint with exhaustion from sixteen hours of ceaseless toil, work was suspended until daybreak. Most simply stayed on the island and slept on cots set up in the hospital. The body count stood at nearly five hundred, and everyone knew that sunrise would bring still more. They nodded off to sleep to the steady sounds of men hammering nails into pine boards—an all-night crew of carpenters hired to construct hundreds of coffins in anticipation of the next day’s work.

  THE MORNING AFTER

  The steel wheels of the elevated train screeched to a halt at the Eighth Street station. Out onto the platform stepped eleven-yearold Willie Keppler. A light, cool drizzle fell on him from a cloudy early-morning sky. The station was all but deserted—strange, for a weekday. Descending to the street below, he noticed the same thing—Little Germany was nearly silent, not unlike a Sunday morning. Stores remained shuttered and a smaller than usual number of commuters could be seen heading for work.

  Keppler found the eerie calm unnerving but hardly puzzling, for he knew perfectly well what had caused it. He had been on the Slocum the day before and survived because he could swim. But because he’d disobeyed his father and gone on the excursion against his orders, Willie stayed in Harlem all day, afraid of the whipping he would receive. He eventually spent the night in a park and might have stayed away longer had he not picked up a copy of the World and seen his name listed among the missing. That convinced him to head home, preferring “to get the licking instead of breaking me mudder’s heart.”

  As the boy trudged home to meet his parents, evidence of the Slocum disaster was everywhere. “Walk where one would,” wrote one reporter, “from Third avenue to the river on the east and from First Street in the south to Tenth Street to the north, the scenes of death, of mourners seeking their dead or wailing over their lost ones’ bodies, of remnants of families all but obliterated, with those left behind scarcely able as yet to realize the Slocum tragedy, were yet constantly before one.” Black hearses and wagons rattled through the streets bearing coffins. Here and there he passed people dressed in black hurrying, he soon discovered, in the direction of the morgue. Occasionally he heard crying and moans of despair coming from open tenement windows.

  Finally, Willie reached his home. Slowly he ascended the stairs until he reached his family’s apartment. He hesitated as he gripped the doorknob— fearing his father’s wrath. Yet when he entered he was greeted—to his shock and delight—by his stunned parents with a shower of hugs and kisses. “And me fadder,” he explained with a smile, “give me a half dollar for being a good swimmer.”

  Throughout the neighborhood, however, evidence abounded that the Kepplers’ experience was the exception to the rule. Despite the catastrophe of the previous day, the district’s many public schools were open that morning. Like the rest of the neighborhood, they were uncharacteristically quiet. Their flags were at half-mast and several policemen stood out front.

  It was inside the school buildings, however, where the impact of the Slocum disaster was most evident. That morning teachers and administrators took attendance with particular care and found scores were absent. This was the first indication of just how many children perished in the fire—51 from P.S. 25 on East Fifth Street; 21 from P.S. 122 on East Ninth; 19 from P.S. 129 on East 19th; 14 from P.S. 104 on East 16th, and many more. It was but part of a much larger toll that totaled 356 children under the age of fourteen.

  On hand were no grief counselors or extra staff. Instead, Superintendent Maxwell sent out a memo to all the city’s schools noting how the Slocum disaster provided teachers and principals with “the opportunity to admonish their pupils to remain cool and collected in the presence of sudden danger, which is always imminent in a great city; not to risk their lives unnecessarily; to learn to swim; and always to be ready to lend a helping hand to those weaker than themselves.” The lesson-minded Maxwell did, however, call for flags to be flown at half-mast and for graduation ceremonies to be postponed until the following week.

  The parents and relatives of many of these missing and dead children could be found at St. Mark’s, where volunteers continued to collect and make known the lists of the dead, missing, injured, and unscathed. Outside the church a long line stretched down the block in near-total silence. In the morning drizzle women stood with shawls over their heads, men with their collars turned up and hats pulled low. They shuffled forward as if in a trance, many having not slept in more than twenty-four hours. “At times a woman would scream and the rest would look up inquiringly for a moment,” observed one reporter, “then drop their eyes again to the sidewalk.”

  At the top of the stairs they read a note from Pastor Haas posted on the front of the church. “In a common loss, we have a common hope. I wish I could be with you, but I am stricken just as you are.” Inside, searchers posed their questions to the volunteers. A few received word of a loved one’s body being found, but most received only “the shake of a head and a few kindly words of the clergymen.” Then it was back home or to the morgue, or simply to the back of the line to ponder what one reporter called their “fathomless misery.”

  All night long, while the people of Little Germany had searched and waited for answers, the city newspaper editors prepared the morning editions. For most of Wednesday their presses churned out updated Extras! every hour. It was news coverage by piecemeal. The morning editions, however, would offer the first chance to tell the whole story—at least as much as was known by the early-morning hours. This meant not merely publishing the first accurate numbers regarding the probable death toll, but also a fuller range of stories based on extensive interviews with survivors and rescuers. Equally important, it provided the first opportunity to weigh in editorially on the tragedy, its cause and meaning.

  The papers were unanimous in their expressions of horror over the disaster. It was not merely the volume of death—estimates of the toll ranged from 600 to more than 1,000—but also the setting and victims. “That a Sunday School picnic should all at once become a hideous massacre,” wrote the Times, “is revolting to the imagination.” It was particularly distressing, the papers agreed, that in the words of the World, “those of the weaker sex and of tender age” were the fire’s chief victims. So too was the fact that the disaster happened, observed the Eagle, “a few yards from shore.”

  But the papers differed in the assessment of blame. It was still early yet and the full scope of the Slocum’s unsafe conditions and cowardly performance of its crew was not widely known. As a result several papers urged caution. “It is now too soon,” offered the Tribune, “to censure anybody.” The Sun concurred—“Judgment should be suspended until all the facts are brought out.” There was no question, however, the Sun editors stressed, that one or more people were responsible for the disaster. It was not “an act of God.”

  Most of the city’s dailies, however, felt enough evidence was at hand to allow for some preliminary accusations. Nearly all agreed that a significant factor in the disaster was the weak and ineffective body of law governing steamboat construction. How else to explain the fact that a steamboat certified as safe
on May 5 could go up in flames like “a mere tinder heap of painted wood” on June 15, as the World put it. Many agreed that steamboat regulations should be raised to the level of transatlantic liners, but the press went further, demanding the indictment of the inspectors.

  Surprisingly, given the fury yet to come, only one paper criticized Captain Van Schaick. “His decision to head for North Brother Island,” wrote the Brooklyn Standard Union, “caused the loss of many precious lives.” In contrast, most of the papers praised the captain and his pilots for staying at their posts until the very end. “That they behaved with physical courage,” asserted the Sun, “is not in dispute.” Some papers even praised the crew for their performance in fighting the flames.

  The papers that morning also restrained themselves when it came to assessing the culpability of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company. Nearly all mentioned the allegations of defective life preservers, but deferred judgment until more evidence was at hand. None used, as they soon would, words like “murder” to describe the disaster. That would change in only a few hours, as overwhelming evidence of negligence and dereliction of duty accumulated.

  THAT MAKES NUMBER 522

  Mayor McClellan spent the night at his regular home in Washington Square. Traveling out to his new summer cottage at Long Branch was out of the question, given the enormity of the tragedy and the fact that recovery operations were ongoing to find some five hundred missing passengers. After a shorter than usual sleep, he rose, dressed, and walked to city hall in a drizzle, his mind fixed on the troubling matters that awaited his attention. Even if he had wanted to think of something else, it would have been impossible, for on every corner, newsies called out the morning headlines.