by Ed O'Donnell
Ghostlike, the afflicted members of the flock stood silently in the church, praying and waiting for the service to begin. In the distance they heard the joyful peals of church bells calling together some congregation, sounds that only accentuated the sorrowful setting.
A few minutes after the hour, uncharacteristic for St. Mark’s or any German church for that matter, the simple service began. Reverend Holstein, a retired minister from Brooklyn, entered and faced the tearful assemblage. With half the parish choir dead, along with the organist, there would be no music, even if desired. Instead, he recited the lines from J. S. Bach’s Cantata 27, “Who Knows How Near Is My End.”
Just as the last words were read, the small, silent crowd stirred. In the doorway leading to the vestry was Pastor Haas, covered in bandages and held up by his son and brother. Without prompting everyone rose in a wordless expression of sorrow and gratitude. For a few seconds all was still, then as one witness remembered it, “the long pent-up storm of emotion broke,” and everyone began to cry. “From all directions, came the sound of weeping, of sobs low and heartbreaking, sobs childish and tearful, sobs dry and hard and terrible.” Haas took his place in a pew, bowed his head in prayer, and listened as Holstein proceeded to read several selections from the Bible, including the 39th Psalm:
And now, Lord, what wait I for?
My hope is in Thee…
Remove Thy stroke away from me.
I am consumed by the blow of Your hand.
When it was over, all remained standing until Reverend Haas hobbled through the doorway leading to the vestry. Then with heads bowed and shoulders slumped, the parishioners shuffled out into the sunlight of a gorgeous Sunday morning.
All day the scenes of Black Saturday were repeated as hearses filled the streets and mourners lined the sidewalks of the neighborhood. One hundred fifty-nine people were buried, including Mary Abendschein, the woman who organized the excursion. By evening, officials at the Lutheran cemetery estimated that some fifty thousand mourners had thronged there to witness burials or lay flowers on the graves of those already interred. In the most moving service, two hundred children from the nearby Trinity Lutheran Church each carried a potted plant into the cemetery, placed it on the grave of the unidentified dead, and sang “Nearer, My God, To Thee.”
In spite of it being a Sunday, Coroners O’Gorman and Berry continued their investigation in preparation for the next day’s formal inquest. They devoted the main portion of their day to a trip retracing the Slocum’s last journey. They brought with them on the police boat the Slocum’s assistant pilot, Edwin H. Weaver. Pleased to be out of jail, Weaver took the helm of the police boat and went over the course, answering questions put to him by the coroners as well as Inspector Albertson and an ex-fire marshal. When the key question of the day was put to him—what would he have done if he had been captain—Weaver answered without hesitation, “I would have run her in at the foot of East One Hundred and Twenty-ninth Street,” he asserted, “which could have been done in a few minutes’ time.” His statement both sickened and thrilled O’Gorman and Berry, for it meant that Van Schaick, on top of operating a firetrap staffed by incompetents, had committed a fatal error in judgment in deciding to run at top speed into the wind for North Brother Island. They’d believed this since the day of the fire, only now they had confirmation of it from one of the principal men in the pilothouse. Weaver’s challenge to Van Schaick’s version of the story would be a crucial piece of evidence when repeated under oath at the coming inquest. “I am perfectly satisfied with the results of the trip,” O’Gorman told reporters when the police boat docked.
Federal authorities were also on hand for their own fact-finding cruise on the East River. Secretary of Commerce and Labor Cortelyou was joined by USSIS inspector general George Uhler and supervising inspector for the Second District Robert S. Rodie on a tug that left from the pier at East Third Street. Retracing the Slocum’s voyage, they proceeded to North Brother Island, where they paused to watch workers remove twenty bodies from the water. Next they visited the Slocum at Hunts Point and watched as three bodies were removed from the wreck. Satisfied with the recovery and investigation efforts under way, Cortelyou left for Washington later in the day, leaving Uhler and Rodie under strict orders not to speak with the press. The two did issue a brief written statement assuring the skeptical public that the coming federal investigation would be “complete and thorough in every respect.”
The effort to recover the bodies of some four hundred missing victims continued in earnest, but the results were frustrating. Forty-seven remains were recovered from various locations in the river and in the wreckage and transported to the morgue, where a crowd of ten thousand waited. Now, four days since the fire, many searchers feared that the missing bodies had been swept out to sea by the tides. Still there was reason to hope that the raising of the wreck later in the week would lead to more recoveries. By midnight Sunday, 22 bodies remained unidentified out of 628 recovered. Little Germany’s undertakers faced several more days of nonstop work.
Late Sunday evening, as a steamer passed Seabright on its way home from an all-day excursion at the shore, a man fell overboard. Alert passengers and crewmen threw life preservers to him as he flailed in the water. But each one sank as soon as it hit the water, and the man drowned.
A TANGLE OF CONTRADICTIONS
Over the course of the next week, news of the Slocum disaster continued to fill the pages of the city’s dailies. Martin Green and his fellow editors sent out legions of scribes and photographers to gather the stories and images a horrified but fascinated public demanded. Although competition for scoops and unique stories was keen, there was little to distinguish the coverage of one paper from another.
Each day readers scanned a table printed on page 1 as though checking a box score or stock index. It listed the ever-rising number of bodies recovered, bodies identified, persons listed as missing, and the probable total. On Monday, June 20, the World announced that the “latest figures” from the police showed 669 bodies recovered and 353 missing. On Wednesday the updated figures read 855 recovered and 200 missing, but a new canvass launched that morning of the Little Germany neighborhood by one hundred German-speaking policemen promised the most accurate tally to date. When the results were made public on Saturday, June 25, the estimated death toll stood at 1,031 (the official death toll was eventually set at 1,021). The Slocum incident now held the unenviable distinction of being the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in U.S. history.
A key factor in driving this grim number upward was the sudden and quite unexpected appearance of several hundred bodies beginning on Monday. This merciful turn of events was likely due to the buildup of gases within the decomposing corpses, but workers attributed it to a violent thunderstorm on Monday. Their conclusion was based on a long-standing belief that loud thunder or explosions could raise a submerged body, allegedly by causing the spleen to burst, which in turn caused bloating leading to buoyancy. Eager to try anything that might hasten the recovery effort, O’Gorman ordered the river “sounded.” All day Tuesday the East River echoed with the report of two artillery pieces mounted on a float and towed by a tug. On Wednesday, spectators along the shore and in boats were treated to a series of spectacular dynamite explosions that sent plumes of water more than one hundred feet into the air. Scores of bodies surfaced during the day, as did countless dead and stunned fish.
As before, all recovered bodies went directly to the Charities Pier at East 26th Street. But their condition was such that identification was possible only by clothing, personal effects, and photographs. Remarkably, nearly two hundred were identified in this manner before Wednesday afternoon, when fifty-two unknown victims were buried at the Lutheran cemetery. Any remains later identified from clothing and effects were exhumed and buried in family plots. Pastor Haas’s daughter was identified in this manner on Saturday June 25, as was Frank Weber’s son Frank, Jr.
On Thursday afternoon, with the rate of recove
ry once again slowed, Commissioner James Tully ordered the temporary morgue at the Charities Pier closed and disinfected. Any future recoveries, he announced, would be handled in the official morgue adjacent to the pier. The next day seventy-five photographs of bodies, clothing, and personal effects went on display at the police station on East Fifth Street.
One of the biggest stories of the week concerned the monumental effort to raise the Slocum. It took longer than expected for the salvage experts at the Merritt Chapman Company to free the hulk from its resting place in five feet of mud, but by Wednesday evening they had five chains under the hull. The next morning, through a combination of hoisting and pumping, they brought the charred wreck to the surface. Officials, workers, and cu riosity seekers stared at the sight, both awed and horrified by the completeness of the fire’s destructive work. Almost nothing remained of the boat’s upper works. Three decks, cabins, pilothouse—all were gone. As a Times reporter described it:
Much of the water has been pumped out of the Slocum and her bulk is high out of the water. Her big walking beam looms out of the wreck like an enormous gallows. Part of her starboard wheel is still intact, and her port wheel driving rod still has a few blades of the wheel adhering to it. The big boilers, covered with rust, stand like two towers in the middle of the hulk.
On Friday the Slocum was towed to a shipyard at Erie Basin in Brooklyn where investigators began poring over it to find the source of the fire and additional evidence of negligence on the part of the vessel’s owners and crew.
That evening some fifteen hundred people turned out at the Grand Opera House for a charity performance by vaudeville stars like Lillian Russell and an up-and-comer named George M. Cohan. After deducting expenses the event raised $3,000 for the relief fund, which by the end of the following day surpassed $107,000. Contributions ranging from pocket change to hundreds of dollars poured in all week, from Mrs. Francis Smith and J. Rabinowich, who each contributed a dollar, to Tammany Hall and the Coney Island Jockey Club, who turned over checks for $2,000 and $1,000 respectively.
Hermann Ridder, chairman of the relief fund committee, announced that a grand total of $150,000 would be needed to pay for hundreds of funerals and provide relief for families left destitute. A special effort would be made to establish a long-term relief fund for the dozens of children orphaned by the disaster. In addition to money, many organizations such as the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, the Children’s Aid Society, and many women’s clubs organized food deliveries and child care for homes left motherless.
Investigations on the federal level moved forward with the creation on Thursday, June 23, of a special United States Commission of Investigation Upon the Disaster to the Steamer General Slocum. Acting under the auspices of Secretary Cortelyou, the five-man commission included one high- ranking officer each from the navy and army and three top officials from the Department of Commerce and Labor, including USSIS inspector general Uhler. They were charged by President Roosevelt and Cortelyou with making “a careful and thorough investigation of the disaster” to determine its cause and make recommendations for reforming the USSIS and crafting new legislation regarding steamboat safety. Many were pleased by the news, aware that regulations of steamboat safety rested almost exclusively with the federal government. They took their trust-busting president at his word when he vowed that justice would be served. But others, particularly those loyal to the Democratic Party, dismissed the commission as mere election-year window dressing. “What a farce!” snarled the Journal of Commerce.“Mark you, every man on Cortelyou’s commission is an administration toady.”
The following day, Friday, June 25, United States District Attorney Henry L. Burnett held a joint news conference with State District Attorney William Travers Jerome to detail the forthcoming criminal proceedings related to the Slocum disaster. As the city and state of New York lacked any authority or standing in the case, a federal grand jury would convene the following week to review evidence, listen to testimony, and, if warranted, hand down indictments. Jerome and Coroner Berry promised their full cooperation.
The real story of the week, however, the one that dominated headlines and stoked public indignation, was the coroner’s inquest that began on Monday morning, June 20. Coroner Joseph Berry arrived early at the Second Battery Armory at Bathgate Avenue and 177th Street. Normally he conducted inquiries in the hearing room at his office, but experience from the past five days convinced him that a larger venue would be necessary. The drill room at the Second Battery Armory was ideal, though it required a few temporary modifications before the inquest could begin. Carpenters were still hammering together the platform for the witness stand and the jury box when he strode into the imposing edifice.
One of his first tasks was to ensure that his evidence was at hand. To his relief he found several visibly defective life preservers, coils of rotten and worn fire hose, lengths of standpipe with unopened valves, and a section of railing that four dead people were found clinging to. He could only wonder how the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company would attempt to dismiss such damning evidence of criminal negligence.
Although the hearings would be held before a jury charged with listening to the testimony and rendering a verdict of guilty or not guilty, the coroner’s inquest did not have the standing of a court of law. Its chief purpose was to gather as much evidence and testimony as possible, render a verdict, and then turn the matter over to the slower-moving federal investigation and prosecution. For this reason, all the participants took the proceedings very seriously, knowing full well that all testimony and evidence gathered would very likely be used by federal prosecutors. Indeed, many federal officials, including U.S. Assistant District Attorney Henry Wise, were on hand to personally hear the testimony.
By 9:00 A.M. the key participants began to arrive. Among the first was State District Attorney Francis P. Garvan, who entered with an entourage of staffers and lawyers. The week promised to be a big one in his career, as he, through a prior arrangement with Berry, would handle most of the questioning of witnesses. But the twenty-nine-year-old Garvan was motivated by more than mere ambition; he carried with him the anger of a reformer confronted with the dreadful consequences of corruption and greed run amok. “I don’t care whose toes I step on!” he told the press over the weekend. “I’m going to find out who was responsible for this ghastly occurrence. The truth will be exposed.”
Frank A. Barnaby followed Garvan, accompanied by his counsel, ex- judge Abram Dittenhoeffer. Attorney Terence McManus, counsel representing the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company, arrived, as did Inspector Henry Lundberg and his lawyer, Mr. S. J. Gilbert. More witnesses and lawyers followed, until all were seated. At 9:45, Berry gave the signal to admit the spectators. Given the huge crowd gathered outside the building, only the relatives of people killed in the Slocum disaster or survivors were admitted. The curious, the sympathetic, and the outraged would have to read about the inquest in the evening papers.
Everyone stared as the forlorn mass shuffled into the spectators’ gallery. Many were wrapped in bandages and used crutches and canes to walk. Others showed no indication of physical injury, but their haggard faces and red, sleepless eyes told of their suffering and loss. They were there seeking answers.
Shortly after 10:00 A.M., Frank A. Barnaby was called as the first witness. Nattily dressed in a gray summer suit, the forty-eight-year-old businessman did his best to appear at ease as Garvan began his questioning. The latter opened with some perfunctory questions about Barnaby and the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company, but soon homed in on the crucial question of whether the life preservers aboard the Slocum were useless, as so many had charged. What evidence did Barnaby have, asked Garvan, to justify his contention that the Slocum carried hundreds of new life preservers? Barnaby reached into his coat and coolly drew out some bills and handed them to the young assistant DA. Garvan scanned them as he asked that they be noted as evidence.
“You know of your own knowledge tha
t these bills are for Slocum apparatus,” asked Garvan with his eyebrows slightly raised to suggest some doubt.
“I do,” answered Barnaby curtly.
“I find here five bills,” continued Garvan, “they are for life preservers— about 350 of them—and they are dated May 14, 1902; April 30, 1903; May 1903; April 1904; and May 1904. You are sure all these were for the General Slocum?”
“Yes.”
Garvan paused and then pounced.
“If that is the case,” he asked suddenly, “how is it that I find in some of these bills the name ‘Grand Republic’ scratched out or taken out with acid and the name ‘Slocum’ inserted? One of the bills still stands in the name of the Grand Republic.”
“I don’t know about that,” snapped Barnaby. “I suppose that some bookkeeper must have done that.”
“What is the name of that bookkeeper?” demanded Garvan in a tone that indicated he knew he’d just cracked the aura of invulnerability most corporate executives enjoyed.
“I don’t know,” stammered a flustered Barnaby. “Separate accounts are kept for each boat. The books will show to which one the life preservers went.”
“Any erasures in them?” asked Garvan, looking knowingly in the direction of the jury. Barnaby gave no answer, so Garvan continued to press the witness, who was by now sweating profusely.
“How do those bills show on your books?”