by Ed O'Donnell
But then as the wheels of justice slowed to a crawl, the public seemed to lose interest, especially as other events competed for attention. In late June and early July the Republican and Democratic national conventions were held, with Theodore Roosevelt and Judge Alton B. Parker gaining their respective nominations. News of the St. Louis World’s Fair at home and the Russo-Japanese War abroad filled the dailies’ columns on a regular basis, as did the sensational Nan Patterson murder story. The New York Giants baseball team made headlines not merely for finishing first in the National League but for refusing to play Boston, the American League champions, in the recently established World Series (Boston had won the first one in 1903). “We’re the champions of the only real major league,” sneered the Giants’ John McGraw. In late October the city threw a massive party to celebrate the opening of its new subway. A few weeks later hometown hero Theodore Roosevelt was elected president. The Slocum story returned again and again to the dailies, but never to the degree that it had in the two weeks immediately following the disaster.
When they did make news, Slocum-related stories rarely made the front page. For example, in late August a new scandal broke when it was learned that a New Jersey cork manufacturer had inserted iron bars in blocks of cork it sold to the Kahnweiler life preserver company. This was done to fraudulently (and cheaply) raise the weight of the cork to the legal minimum. Although not directly related to the Slocum disaster, the incident immediately put it back in the news because of the role defective life preservers had played in it.
The Slocum again faded until several papers picked up on the unusual story of one man’s ongoing search for his little boy. William Bandelow lost his wife and five-year-old daughter in the disaster. But stories from rescuers of a little blond boy saved and brought to the Brooklyn shore, coupled with the lack of a body, convinced him that his three-year-old son George was alive, living with a woman who believed he was an orphan. Bandelow had five hundred circulars printed with a photo and description of the boy, along with a promise. “I offer a reward of $100 for the recovery of my boy alive or dead.” And if that was not incentive enough, he assured the reader, “If you can in any way assist me in finding the child you will help one who has lost all dear to him in this world.” The story stayed alive well into the fall, fed by numerous alleged sightings, before disappearing for good.
Two events in October, one trivial, the other serious, briefly revived the Slocum story. On October 16 a showgirl named Fanny Baker began a week- long publicity scam designed to boost her flagging stage career. She claimed that her uncle, a Mr. A. P. Baker of Michigan, had been aboard the Slocum. Panicked at the outbreak of the fire, he put his will and deeds to his properties in a tin box and cast it into the East River. He survived the disaster, she claimed, long enough to tell her that she was named in the will as his sole beneficiary. And so after issuing press releases to the papers, Fanny Baker astonished onlookers as she donned a heavy diving suit and spent the afternoon on the bottom of the East River. No box or fortune was found, since neither had ever existed, but Fanny did succeed in garnering a priceless bit of fame.
On the very same day, the Federal Commission of Investigation established by President Roosevelt and Secretary Cortelyou issued its report. The scathing sixty-two-page document pulled no punches in denouncing the conduct of Captain Van Schaick and his crew and condemning the gross negligence of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company executives. Moreover, it castigated the New York bureau of the USSIS as corrupt and inept and recommended the firing of Rodie, Dumont, and Barrett. President Roosevelt, having seen the report a week earlier, agreed, and the three were immediately terminated. Finally, the report laid out a series of sweeping regulatory reforms, most of which would be subsequently enacted by Congress.
With no action on the prosecutions of the seven indicted men, the Slocum once again slipped out of the public eye. Then on December 1 the famed muckraking journal Munsey’s magazine published a lengthy piece about the Slocum disaster. The article’s tone and take on the affair was vividly conveyed by its subtitle: THE EXACT FACTS OF THE MOST SHOCKING AND PITIFUL TRAGEDY IN THE ANNALS OF THE SEA, WITH THE DAMNING EVIDENCE OF CRIMINAL INDIFFERENCE AND DESPICABLE DISHONESTY ON THE PART OF THE DIRECTORS AND INSPECTORS.
More to the point, the author, Herbert N. Casson, captured the sense of fear shared by many concerned people that the Slocum disaster was being forgotten and the guilty ones about to go free. “The article that follows,” he wrote in his opening sentence, “is published to make people think.” For the next twenty-one pages Casson laid out a no-holds-barred indictment of all involved and then closed with a poignant question.
This nation remembered the Maine. It was willing, even enthusiastic, to shoulder the ponderous burden of war because of the destruction of a battleship and two hundred and sixty men. But what about the Slocum? What about this loss of life that is almost four-fold greater and incomparably less excusable? How shall this mystery be explained—that we rush to battle to avenge the death of two hundred and sixty young men, who had knowingly enlisted in a perilous calling, and then sit as helpless as a colony of rabbits when a treacherous and law-breaking corporation burns and drowns a thousand of our women and children?
While no immediate answer was in the offing, another steamboat tragedy in New York gave added weight to Casson’s impassioned plea for justice and reform. On December 17 the steamer Glen Island bound for New Haven, Connecticut, caught fire on Long Island Sound. The captain and crew performed admirably, as did the lifeboats, but seven crewmen and two passengers nonetheless died in the incident. It served to jog the public’s fading memory of the Slocum disaster and to make clear the fact that serious reforms were needed in steamboat safety and regulation.
Then came the three consecutive mistrials of Inspector Henry Lund- berg. For a time, as day after day the papers carried the testimony of crewmen, survivors, and witnesses (“Slocum Horror Retold” was a typical headline), it appeared that the story had once again taken center stage. Yet with each mistrial the stories grew smaller and appeared deeper and deeper in each edition, often only as a simple recap without details, quotes, or photographs. By the time of the first anniversary memorial service, the city’s editors had all but shifted their coverage of the Slocum disaster from that of a news story to one of human interest. To their utter frustration, those who cared deeply about the Slocum story and its questions of justice and public safety were learning a hard lesson. As veteran city editor Stanley Walker would later write, “News is as hard to hold as quicksilver, and it fades more rapidly than any morning glory.” Even the news of the needless loss of more than a thousand lives.
MEMORIES
The one place from which the details, emotions, and legacies of the Slocum disaster never faded, of course, was in the hearts and minds of the survivors and relatives of those killed. Like any traumatic, life-altering event, the disaster of June 15, 1904, permanently changed the way they viewed their world and themselves. For some it meant learning to live with the voids left behind by those who died. For others it meant wrestling with what modern psychologists term “survivor’s guilt,” the constant, nagging and maddeningly unanswerable questions: Why did I survive and they perish? What if I’d reacted differently when the fire broke out? Or held on tighter in the water? Often these challenges were made all the more difficult to meet by poverty, permanent injury, and the debilitating effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Ultimately, however, these people all asked the same fundamental question: How will I go on?
For men like Pastor Haas, the answer was simple. “We must continue our work,” he admonished his flock in his first sermon following the disaster, “we must not give up.” Their loved ones were gone, he acknowledged, but “we can hold our love as a memory of our dead.” We can and must turn the calamity into “a blessing” and accept God’s challenge to rebuild our lives and our parish.
For Haas, this was no silver-lining-trust-in-God’s-ways blather. Rather, it was an expres
sion of true conviction. His dead wife and daughter, he believed, did not want him to wallow in despair. He believed they would want him to continue his ministry to the stricken people of St. Mark’s. And so he did, despite the painful memories that confronted him at every corner of the neighborhood and the many tempting offers from more prestigious parishes and colleges.
The task before him was enormous. The fire not only swept away half of St. Mark’s membership, but also compelled scores of families to move away from a neighborhood so intimately linked with the death of their loved ones. Nearly one year after the fire, a survey produced by the city’s Commissioners of Accounts reported to Mayor McClellan that 170 (28 percent) of the 622 families known to have been on the Slocum had moved out of Little Germany. It was a trend that only accelerated in the years to come, so that by 1910 only a handful remained and Little Germany was practically gone. The Slocum disaster did not cause the disintegration of Little Germany (the trend was well under way even in the 1890s), but it did make it happen more quickly.
Haas, nonetheless, pulled off a small miracle and saved the parish. Bolstered by his deep faith in God, he stayed on for seventeen years after the fire and ministered to an ever-shrinking congregation. He even remarried, choosing as his bride Clara Holthusen, the sister of John Holthusen, the former principal of St. Mark’s Sunday school. In 1921, after thirty-nine years of faithful service to St. Mark’s, the sixty-seven-year-old minister retired as pastor, moved to Staten Island, and joined the faculty of Wagner College. He died at his home September 29, 1927.
Catherine Gallagher’s story of overcoming the devastating effect of the fire is equally compelling. Having lost her mother and two siblings in the fire, the eleven-year-old suffered another blow immediately after when her father, overcome with grief, abandoned her. She moved in with her poor, elderly grandparents and together they struggled to get by on savings and her twenty-five dollars per month from the relief fund. When her grandfather died two years later—from a broken heart, the family always believed— she and her grandmother moved in with her aunt and uncle. Soon Catherine was forced to quit school to work in a cigar box factory. All the while she carried in her heart both the sorrow of losing her mother and siblings and the feeling of guilt that somehow she had driven her father away.
Notwithstanding this harrowing childhood, Catherine managed to live what she described as “a very good life.” At age twenty she married Thomas Connelly, a truck driver, and together they had eleven children. Every now and again she told her children about the fire. “I thought at first it was a terrible fairy tale that Mother made up. That it never happened,” remembered her daughter Betty Reilly. As she got older, Catherine talked about the fire more frequently, as though she’d progressively lost her ability to repress her memories of the traumatic ordeal. “If I close my eyes,” she told an interviewer at age 104 (93 years after the fire), “I can still see the whole thing.” Right up to her death in November 2002 at age 109, she urged her family to always attend the annual memorial service. “Go,” she told her daughter Betty Reilly a week before the ceremony in 2001, “make sure no one ever forgets the General Slocum.”
Others left behind by the tragedy were unable to handle the pain with such fortitude and strength. Andrew Stiel was similarly overwhelmed by grief and painful memories, but he chose a very different response. A widower, he’d lost his four children, three sons and a daughter age six to sixteen, on the Slocum. Heartbroken by his loss and tormented by his decision to let them go on the excursion, he fell into despair. No amount of consoling from friends or relatives could diminish his agony and loneliness. Like at least half a dozen others, he soon committed suicide.
Thoughts of suicide no doubt crossed the mind of Paul Liebenow from time to time. But they were no doubt countered by his sense of responsibility to care for what remained of his family, his wife Anna and daughter Adella, the youngest survivor of the disaster and the toddler called upon to unveil the monument to the unidentified dead in the Lutheran cemetery. As a bartender in a popular Harlem restaurant, he earned a respectable working-class wage of twenty dollars per week. With a family to support and bills for his and his wife’s ongoing medical care for injuries suffered in the fire, he had no choice but to press on with his life as best he could. He joined the Organization of the General Slocum Survivors, helped raise money for the monument in the cemetery, and testified at most of the hearings and trials related to the Slocum disaster.
But he gradually came to believe, no doubt in part as a result of the failed Lundberg trials and diminishing public interest in the story, that he needed to create a record of the Slocum disaster. It would not be for him or his wife, for neither seemed capable of forgetting any of the details of the ordeal. Rather, he would do it for his baby, Adella. Six months old at the time of the tragedy, she had no memory of the fire, the near-drowning, the funerals, or even her sisters. And yet he instinctually knew that the Slocum disaster had forever changed her parents and would forever shape her life.
So sometime in early May 1905, as plans for the first anniversary ceremony and monument dedication neared completion, Paul Liebenow bought a scrapbook. Then he began to clip Slocum-related articles from the daily newspapers like the Times, Tribune, Journal, and World as well as the German-language Herold and Staats-Zeitung and paste them into the book. The first were the stories related to the first anniversary service. Nearly all featured headlines and photographs referring to his beloved daughter as the “Youngest Slocum Survivor” and her role in unveiling the monument. These reflected the pride he felt in his daughter and her successful performance. But in the weeks, months, and years that followed, the scrapbook collection showed a man desperate to leave his daughter a chronicle of the event that had so utterly altered her life. He added page after page of articles related to the Slocum investigations and trials, but also anything remotely related to steamboat accidents or safety violations. “Passengers in Terror on Drifting Ferry-Boat,” read one such piece from the World. But Liebenow also clipped, as if to suggest that all had not died in vain, any article about reforms in steamboat safety regulations—“New Law Will Make Life Preservers Safe” and “Era of Fireproof Steamboat Dawns.”
Nothing seems to have escaped his eye, including postage-stamp-sized articles noting deckhand John Coakley’s arrest for theft, Captain Van Schaick’s marriage, Officer Scheuing’s award for heroism in saving lives at North Brother Island, and several stories about relatives of Slocum victims committing suicide or going insane. “Driven To Suicide, As Was His Brother, by Slocum Horror,” read the headline of one.
As the project took on a life of its own, Liebenow began to include artifacts and documents related to the family’s experience in the disaster. On one page he pasted in envelopes from the morgue that had held the personal effects of his nephew and niece Frank and Emma Weber. On the latter the morgue worker had scrawled: “Emma Weber, Body 765, Ring—diamond chip, Sterling Silver Chain bracelet—charred.”
On another page he added the letters written to him by friends after they learned of the disaster. One came from an old friend, Conrad Haas, who was working at a restaurant on the grounds of the St. Louis World’s Fair. He read about the fire and wrote inquiring about the Liebenows and offering his “sincere and heartfelt sympathy” in the event that any were among the dead. Elsewhere he included solicitation letters from florists on the eve of the first anniversary service urging customers to order early to avoid the rush and from lawyers offering their services should he decide to sue the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company.
Liebenow clearly wanted his daughter Adella to know of his role in the fight for justice. The scrapbook contains all of his subpoenas calling him to testify at the coroner’s inquest and several of the subsequent trials, as well as countless letters and membership cards for the Organization of the General Slocum Survivors. He also wanted her to know of his ongoing effort to find and identify Helen’s missing body, so he pasted in several letters from the Department of Chari
ties responding to his requests for additional information.
Some of the most moving items included in the scrapbook are those Liebenow selected to convey the utter unexpectedness of the disaster. On one page, for example, he placed a single portrait photograph of Helen smiling while seated in a pram. It is a vision of innocence and beauty devoid of any suggestion of impending doom. Underneath, he wrote “Our Helen.” Nearly as evocative are two haberdashery receipts pasted side by side on a page. On one showing his purchase of a new suit and hat for the St. Mark’s excursion, he wrote “Before June 15/04.” On the other showing the purchase of a mourning band, he wrote, “After June 15/04.” The first succinctly captured the joyful anticipation of the excursion, the second the shocking result.
Liebenow added material to the scrapbook for four and a half years. On the last page used he pasted in two small stories. One, headlined “Death Welcome To Car Victim,” told of August Bahr’s death. After losing his wife and three children on the Slocum he was never the same. Struck by a streetcar, he exhibited no will to live and died days later of relatively minor injuries. The second article, “General Slocum in Port,” told of the return of the ill-fated boat, its hull now used as a coal barge. The article was dated November 1908, only fourteen months before Liebenow died.
Liebenow’s scrapbook accomplished its intended task. As his Adella grew up, his collection of articles and ephemera helped her understand the Slocum disaster in a way that no number of annual memorial services on June 15s or bits of information gleaned from her mother and other survivors ever could.
But the scrapbook also provided a vivid portrait of her parents’ suffering. Both were reticent and rarely talked about the disaster and the loss of Anna, Helen, and Aunt Martha. Yet as Adella would say decades later when describing the book, “It was his therapy.” As such it captures the inexpressible emotions of sorrow, anger, and guilt. Nowhere was this more evident than in his frequent inclusion of poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox in the book. Wilcox was a very popular if not especially talented poet at the turn of the century whose works frequently appeared in the New York Journal. Much of her poetry consisted of melodramatic stanzas on nature, love, betrayal, and passion. Some, however, dwelt on themes of death, trial, and sorrow—poems influenced by her own experience of losing her only baby just hours after its birth. It was in these poems that Liebenow found a measure of comfort. One poem he clipped, entitled “Sympathy,” asked