Ship Ablaze

by Ed O'Donnell

  Lilly Koeppler, 17 years of age, not found yet, but identified with burned left cheek and hair. All parents will kindly make another examination of their dead to give sorrowful and heartbroken mother information to find her child. Henry and Elsie Koeppler, 192 First Avenue.

  Between sheer exhaustion and rising desperation to find a body, some searchers clearly made false identifications that the overwhelmed morgue staff failed to catch.

  One body of a missing child, in one of the more bizarre events associated with the disaster, actually found her family. Late Thursday afternoon, friends of Henry Heins located him at the morgue where he’d been searching for two daughters (having already found his wife and another daughter). Margaret, his seven-year-old, they explained, had been found floating in the East River near the foot of Clinton Street. Incredibly, it was eight miles from where the Slocum ran aground, but one block from her family’s home at 300 Front Street.

  The scenes of greatest chaos and turmoil, however, were not found at the morgue, but rather in the many undertaking establishments surrounding St. Mark’s. Customarily, in keeping with the elaborate wake and funeral rituals that developed in late-nineteenth-century American life, bodies were moved only one at a time. Undertakers, or “morticians” as many now liked to be called, usually prepared a body for waking and burial, a process that by 1904 included embalming, dressing the deceased in a dignified out fit, and positioning them in a peaceful pose. But by the evening of June 16, the neighborhood’s undertakers were overwhelmed with families requesting their services. Normally accustomed to handling less than a half dozen cases in a typical week, these small family-run establishments now received scores of requests for their services. By the evening the signs of strain had begun to slow.

  Jacob Herrlich’s modest undertaking establishment held fifty-two bodies; his brother’s, twenty-six. Philip Wagner had twenty-three. In some cases coffins lay stacked on sidewalks in front of funeral homes while hearses and even common delivery wagons pressed into emergency service could be seen bearing as many as seven coffins at a time, stopping from house to house as if delivering milk or ice. By late Thursday evening, the grieving were informed, embalming and other rituals of preparation were no longer available. Remains were brought straight to the family’s home. Countless parishioners had to be turned away despite their heartrending pleas to take “just one more.” Regretfully, they were forced to deal with undertakers from beyond the boundaries of St. Mark’s whose service and prices were untested. Complicating matters even further for the undertakers was the fact that so many families had not found all their dead. They refused to go ahead with funerals until everyone was found. It made planning funerals nearly impossible.

  SACRIFICED TO GREED

  At 5:00 P.M. the evening editions of the papers hit the streets. It was just twelve hours since the morning editions had come out, yet the difference in tone and emotion of the disaster commentary had changed dramatically. Gone were the editorials urging the public to avoid a rush to judgment as to who might bear responsibility for the hundreds of lives lost. The steady accumulation of evidence attesting to the dismal condition of the Slocum’s safety equipment and eyewitness statements regarding the utter uselessness of the crew during the emergency had outraged the public. So too had the shocking news that Inspector Lundberg refused to answer Coroner Berry’s questions. The editorialists stood by their assertions in the morning that the laws governing steamboat construction and inspection were inadequate and in need of change, but now shifted their focus to the inspectors and, more important, the owners of the Slocum.

  None surpassed the vehemence of William Randolph Hearst. His Evening Journal seethed with indignation, charging Barnaby and the other directors of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company with wholesale murder:

  It is the old, the usual story of such events in this country, where money laughs at the laws made to protect life—where the dull, sordid, unimaginative love of money deadens the conscience and despises costly safety.

  It is almost unnecessary to go into details. Every American can guess them….

  The lifeboats were inadequate—there might as well have been none.

  The life preservers were old, rotten, useless.

  LIFEBOATS COST MONEY.

  LIFE PRESERVERS COST MONEY.

  Human life is cheap.

  They will regret the deaths—they will, perhaps, send flowers to some of the hundreds of funerals—unless their lawyers advise them that that might be an admission of guilt. They will soon forget the incident that interrupted a business career.

  Next to his editorial was a graphic cartoon depicting a dead child laid out on a mortician’s slab. At her feet was a man, clearly Frank A. Barnaby, counting his profits. At her head stood the grim reaper. Above her frail form floated an image of the burning boat. Accompanying the cartoon a caption read: “The life of this child and many hundreds of others were sacrificed to Greed in the General Slocum disaster. Death and Greed count the profits. When will a day of reckoning come for the criminals that are responsible for the deaths?”

  This tidal wave of collective outrage was precisely what Barnaby had hoped to avoid. Still, he knew how quickly the public tended to forget scandals. And then there was the coming legal battle. He’d already hired a top- notch lawyer and brought the Slocum’s crew into line regarding their testimony.

  “Will the guilty go unpunished as usual?” asked Hearst. “Probably— the money that breaks the law knows how to evade it.”

  Barnaby certainly hoped so.

  At 6:00 P.M. the mayor’s office announced that more than $5,000 had been collected for the relief fund. It was an astonishing sum for a fund roughly six hours old, and it reflected the widespread horror felt by most New Yorkers over the disaster. Donations came in every size. British sportsman Sir Thomas Lipton, who happened to be in New York, gave $1,000. President Roosevelt pledged $500. But most were modest contributions made by countless ordinary citizens who journeyed to city hall or St. Mark’s in an outpouring of mass sympathy that impressed even the most cynical New Yorker. “I never suspected the generous heart beneath the hard-boiled exterior of our city,”wrote one World reporter.“New Yorkers of high and low station trooped to St. Mark’s by carriage, street car, el train, automobile and on foot….Here a beshawled Jewish immigrant woman dropped a crumpled dollar bill into the collection barrel … there a dignified Wall Street broker gave fifty dollars… the line of donors stretched around the block and grew longer every moment …workers, rich men, poor men, beggars, and perhaps thieves gave to the fund … it was an emotional outpouring….Never again will I believe our city has no heart.” By 10:00 P.M. the fund topped $9,000.

  Shortly before midnight, the tugboat Fidelity arrived at the Charities Pier with five more bodies. As workers placed the coffins in the now small rows of unidentified dead, Health Commissioner Darlington ordered the morgue closed and relatives sent home until the morning. Just as soon as the last searcher was escorted from the building, a team of embalmers set to work embalming all the bodies as yet unidentified or uncollected by an undertaker. Their work soon took on the atmosphere of a gothic horror story as a violent thunderstorm enveloped the city. Brilliant blue-white flashes of lightning preceded violent claps of thunder that shook the steel-frame structure.

  Far across New York harbor, at the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company pier on Staten Island, the General Slocum’s sister ship Grand Republic rocked in the wind and waves kicked up by the storm. Suddenly a bolt of lightning sliced through the sky and hit the pier with a tremendous explosion. A small fire broke out, but was quickly extinguished by an alert watchman.

  FRIDAY, JUNE 17

  Friday morning found the streets of Little Germany once again hushed by what one reporter called “the great calm of grief.” Stores remained shuttered and shades drawn while only the occasional wagon or hearse kicked up the dust from the streets.

  Inside their small apartments throughout the neighborhood, members of St. Mark’s
parish were waking—if they slept at all—to the realization that any family member now unaccounted for was certainly dead. While the horrific total was still uncertain because of the great number of missing— estimates ranged from 800 to 1,200 killed—individual tallies were more certain. Henry Cohrs, Fred Baumler, Edwin Fitch, and John Finkenangel, for example, each lost a wife and three children. For William Oellrich, Magnus Hartung, and Edward Muller it was a wife and four children each. Joseph Justin lost his wife and five children. Many of these losses ran even higher when extended families were taken into account. Twenty-nine members of the extended Kohler family, for example, were lost.

  Despite the notable absence of people, especially children, from the neighborhood’s streets and sidewalks, evidence of the tragedy abounded in the doorways of every block. Attached to many doors were small white cards with a somber black border that read We Mourn the Loss of Our Friends. They had been printed and distributed for free by a local printer. On the doors of buildings of families who lost loved ones in the disaster were hung clusters of ribbons, white for children and black for adults. But even these were often poor indicators of the suffering going on inside. One tenement five doors down East Seventh Street from Pastor Haas’s home had five white ribbons attached to its front door, even though fourteen had died. Some families, too poor or too distraught, hung no ribbon at all.

  Activity in the neighborhood would pick up soon enough, as those in search of the nearly five hundred victims still missing headed yet again to the morgue. Others, now considered “fortunate” because they had found the remains of their loved ones, made preparations for the first funerals, scheduled to begin at midday.

  Despite the fact that five hundred people remained unaccounted for, the situation at the Charities Pier was relatively calm. The crowds still remained huge, but the passions of those who’d spent the last two days frantically searching for loved ones had been cooled by the stark reality that too much time had elapsed for any to be found alive. Word had also spread throughout the crowd that nearly all the bodies collected had been identified. By noon Friday only twenty-five remained unidentified on the pier, and by 6:00 P.M. only nine. Thirty bodies burned beyond any hope of recognition were being held in the morgue proper adjacent to the pier.

  Many who visited the Charities Pier that day had already found most of their missing relatives and had funerals scheduled for the next day. They checked in at the morgue hoping to find the last ones so the family might be buried as one. This was the goal of Conrad Muth. His brother and nephew, John and John, Jr., survived the fire, but John’s wife and three children were lost. So too were his mother-in-law, three nieces, and a sister-inlaw. John had broken his leg in the fire, so it fell to Conrad to locate the missing. “All of the family who have been found,” he told a reporter, “will be buried tomorrow afternoon at the same time in the Lutheran Cemetery. I am waiting here to see if I can’t find some of the others.”

  Even quieter was the scene at St. Mark’s Church. The information bureau established in the first hour of the disaster was all but deserted, for it had no information to offer. Anyone unaccounted for by Friday morning was certainly dead. Still, a little more than one hundred people stopped in to make inquiries, and one young boy released from Lebanon Hospital felt compelled to drop by to add his name to the list of survivors.

  A little before ten o’clock the quiet at the church was disturbed by the arrival of more than one hundred clerics of all faiths from churches and synagogues across the city. They came to express their sorrow for the tragic loss of life suffered by St. Mark’s and to pledge their help, especially in conducting the hundreds of funerals expected over the next week. It was agreed that given the circumstances, no public funerals would be held in places of worship. Rather, simple funeral rites would be performed in homes or at undertakers’ establishments. Later, a full-blown public memorial service would be held to honor all the dead. The gathering also agreed that the unidentified dead at the morgue would be buried in a mass grave the next day, Saturday, June 18, with records of valuables and effects kept at the coroner’s office in the event that a later identification was possible.

  These decisions were made by this gathering of clergy for a very simple reason: the leadership of St. Mark’s had nearly been wiped out. Reverend Haas had survived, but was still incapacitated by injuries and grief. The church’s secretary and treasurer had died in the fire, as had the chairman of the poor committee, the sexton, and the choir leader. Seven members of the board of trustees and three members of the board of elders had also perished. As for the church’s Sunday school, apart from the hundreds of children killed, both superintendents (of the German and English sections), its secretary, and several teachers were gone. In all, St. Mark’s lost sixteen of twenty-one parish officers. Until St. Mark’s recovered—if it ever recovered—the ministers in attendance pledged their assistance and leadership. “The calamity,” said Rev. William R. Huntington of Grace Episcopal Church, “has made Lutherans of us all.”

  Shortly after the meeting adjourned, Reverend Kraeling, one of several associate pastors at St. Mark’s, left the church and walked east one block to 242 East Sixth Street. Tucked under his arm was a book contain ing all the rites of the Lutheran ministry—most of them joyful: baptism, confirmation, marriage. Today, however, his marker was placed at the Rite of the Dead. The hour had arrived for the first funeral.

  Upstairs in a typical cramped East Side tenement, he greeted the Harris family and took his place next to the body of Agnes Bell. The Harrises were Orthodox Jews with whom Bell had boarded. She had gone on the trip with their ten-year-old daughter Sylvia. Both were killed, but Sylvia’s body had yet to be recovered. Kraeling offered no eulogy and finished the simple ceremony in fifteen minutes. Two men from the undertakers closed her coffin and carried it to a waiting hearse at the curb. Minutes later, as a small crowd looked on in silence, the vehicle pulled away, headed for the Lutheran cemetery in Queens.

  Ten more funerals would take place that afternoon, a mere glimmer of what lay ahead the next day.

  Farther downtown, while Kraeling recited prayers over Agnes Bell, Mayor McClellan met for the first time with the men he’d named to the relief committee the previous day. Although donations had already begun to pour in, theirs would be the official relief fund. The eighteen men chosen were some of the city’s foremost business, civic, and philanthropic leaders, including Jacob Schiff, Robert A. Van Cortlandt, Morris K. Jessup, George Ehret, and Isaac N. Seligman. Their goal was simple enough: raise a fund sufficient to provide short-term relief, including funeral expenses, to families victimized by the disaster and long-term support to the many orphaned children. Immediately they drew up an appeal for donations that asked the citizens of New York for “a generous response to the necessities caused by this calamity.”

  While to the modern mind this appeal for financial help in the wake of a disaster seems only natural, in 1904 it was done with some reluctance. People were not accustomed to giving money to causes not immediately at hand, with the possible exception of missionary work in Africa. New Yorkers discovered this back in the 1870s when the Statue of Liberty languished in crates because Americans failed to raise enough money to pay for the pedestal. Only when Joseph Pulitzer took the lead in raising money (and newspaper sales) by announcing that he would publish the name of every contributor, even if they only gave a penny, did money pour in. Americans, especially the middle class and wealthy, were by nature suspicious of such funds, regardless of the cause. In part this was due to their belief that charity was something every able-bodied person should avoid at all costs. There was always the danger, even in a calamity like the Galveston hurricane of 1900 or the Johnstown flood of 1889, that charity distributed to victims might undermine their work ethic, warp their values, and ultimately hamper their return to normal life. Hermann Ridder, chairman of the relief committee, recognized these concerns and endeavored to allay them. “The work of the relief will be systematic,” he told the pre
ss, “and while we will be exceedingly liberal with all who come to us for aid, all cases will be thoroughly investigated and dealt with according to thorough business methods.” Translation: fear not—no waste and no freeloading will be permitted. McClellan’s selection of the city’s leading men to serve on the committee was likewise intended to boost confidence in its handling of the money.

  The aversion to charity was plainly evident among the victims themselves. Later in the day when the relief committee opened an office in the basement of St. Mark’s, almost no one showed up. Even in their grief and destitution, the people of Little Germany were too proud to ask for help. Only when dozens of volunteers conducted a door-to-door campaign to convince people to take advantage of the fund did people begin to do so. Even then there were instances of men who sold all their possessions to pay for funeral expenses. Many months later, when all the money had been allocated, the people of St. Mark’s agreed to burn the lists of relief recipients so that none, especially the children, would bear the stigma of having taken a handout.

  But for now the focus was on raising money, and the people of New York responded with an outpouring of generosity. Taking a page from Pulitzer’s Statue of Liberty campaign, the dailies published the names of contributors in the hope that it would stimulate wider giving. Contributions came in from retail magnate F. W. Woolworth ($100) and Wall Street tycoon Bernard Baruch ($250), but also from thousands of average citizens moved by the stories of suffering and despair in Little Germany. Their one and two-dollar contributions helped swell the fund to $15,000 by day’s end. Even children did their part, as evidenced by a note that accompanied a donation of 85 cents.