Ship Ablaze

by Ed O'Donnell

  Is the way hard and thorny, oh, my brother?

  Do tempests beat, and adverse wild winds blow?

  And are you spent, and broken, at each nightfall,

  Yet with each morn you rise and onward go?

  Brother, I know, I know!

  I, too, have journeyed so.

  Another, entitled “Faith,” prompted him to cut it out doubtless because it urged him to trust in God despite his trials.

  I will not doubt, though sorrows fall like rain,

  And troubles swarm like bees about a hive;

  I shall believe the heights for which I strive

  Are only reached by anguish and by pain;

  And though I groan and tremble with my crosses,

  I yet shall see, through my severest losses,

  The greater gain…

  None of the ten poems he clipped from the Journal, however, so fully captured the unending pain endured by a parent who loses a child as did “When a Baby Soul Sails Out.” Although written from the perspective of a mother, it evidently spoke to the sorrow Liebenow (and his wife) carried with him after the loss of Anna, Helen, and a son who died soon after birth one year after the fire. In losing adult loved ones to death, writes Wilcox, it’s not hard to imagine them enjoying the “delights” of heaven.

  But when a child goes yonder

  And leaves its mother here,

  Its little feet must wander,

  It seems to me, in fear.

  What paths of Eden beauty

  What scenes of peace and rest

  Can bring content to one who went

  Forth from a mother’s breast.

  In palace gardens, lonely,

  A little child will roam,

  And weep for pleasures only

  Found in its humble home—

  It is not won by splendor,

  Nor bought by costly toys,

  To hide from harm on mother’s arm

  Makes all its sum of joys.

  It must be when the baby

  Goes journeying off alone,

  Some angel (Mary maybe),

  Adopts it for her own.

  Yet when a child is taken

  Whose mother stays below

  With weeping eyes, through Paradise,

  I seem to see it go.

  With troops of angels trying

  To drive away its fear,

  I seem to hear it crying

  “I want my mamma here.”

  I do not court the fancy,

  It is not based on doubt,

  It is a thought that comes unsought

  When baby souls sail out.

  In the twenty-first century, Wilcox’s poetry is dismissed as mass- produced romantic pap. Indeed, Jenny Ballon, her only biographer, wrote in 1940, “She was not a minor poet, but a bad major one.” Nonetheless, in 1904 some of her work clearly meant a great deal to men like Paul Liebenow as they struggled to press on with their lives under the weight of unspeakable tragedy. Though he frequently annotated his clippings for Adella’s benefit, he wrote nothing next to the poems. He didn’t need to.

  SCAPEGOAT

  One of the stories followed closely by Liebenow was the prosecution of Capt. William Van Schaick. As captain of the General Slocum he was the man most directly connected to the tragedy. Barnaby had failed to purchase adequate safety equipment and Lund- berg had failed to properly inspect the vessel, but it was Van Schaick who seemingly tolerated this negligence and then compounded it by hiring an untrained crew and never holding fire drills. Moreover, it was Van Schaick who made the controversial decision to press ahead at full speed on the East River to North Brother Island instead of simply bringing the Slocum in at a nearby pier. With the likelihood of a trial, let alone a conviction, of Barnaby and the directors of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company fading with the third Lundberg mistrial, all attention focused on the captain.

  United States District Attorney for New York Henry L. Burnett promised in the days following Lundberg’s third mistrial in late May 1905 that the prosecution of Van Schaick would begin immediately. But a crowded court calendar and other unforeseen delays pushed the day of reckoning off eight more months—fully one year and seven months after the Slocum disaster.

  Jury selection began on January 10, 1906, and opening arguments followed five days later. As before, survivors and relatives of victims packed the courtroom, but they harbored expectations greatly diminished since the coroner’s inquest in June 1904. The legal “procrastination,” as the Times put it in an editorial that neatly captured the frustration shared by many, was “a most serious matter.” It eroded the public’s faith in the legal system and caused it to lose interest in the case.

  There has been, not exactly a denial of justice, but something very like it, and all expectation that any real responsibility for criminal negligence involving so many has long since passed away. Not only has indignation cooled, but memories have grown dim in regard to the mute details of the affair, and many witnesses who would have been useful are beyond reach. What the end will be everybody knows—and comparatively few are much concerned about it.

  For those whose indignation had not cooled and memories remained distressingly clear there was great concern, and they packed the courtroom each day. Among them were the Liebenows, including young Adella, who with her mother appeared in a photograph in one of the dailies under the headline “Youngest Survivor At Slocum Trial.” They listened intently to the testimony that commenced on January 16 and brought forth a by now familiar cast of witnesses—Van Wart, Weaver, and Conklin—and a few new ones, including Capt. William Van Schaick, Jr., son of the defendant and master of the steamboat Cephus. Although they searched high and low, officials were unable to find ex-Inspector Henry Lundberg, a witness Van Schaick’s lawyer was eager to put on the stand.

  Neither the Liebenows nor anyone else in the courtroom during the ten days of testimony heard anything new or startling. As in the previous investigations, the questions and answers continued to focus on life preservers, fire drills, and fire hoses. The matter of Van Schaick’s decision to beach the boat on North Brother Island never came up. On January 26, attorneys for both sides presented closing arguments. Assistant United States District Attorney Ernest Baldwin exhorted the jury to find Van Schaick guilty of criminal negligence.

  You can, from the evidence shown you, arrive at but one conclusion, and that is that the death of some of those unfortunate victims of the Slocum was due in whole or in part to the negligence of this man, Captain Van Schaick. Do you believe that if he had done his whole duty the hundred odd burned to death and the nine hundred and odd that were drowned would today be in their graves? You cannot from this mass of uncontradicted evidence arrive at any other conclusion.

  Abram Dittenhoefer, counsel for Van Schaick, then offered his plea for a verdict of not guilty. The USSIS, he argued, was the real culprit, having certified the Slocum as seaworthy six weeks before the disaster. There was no evidence, he continued, to prove intentional and willful neglect on the part of Van Schaick, only perhaps a bit of carelessness. Finally, he noted, life was full of perils that no amount of precaution could fully guard against. Nothing could have saved the forty thousand who perished in the 1902 Mount Pelée volcano eruptions on Martinique. “Even at the Hoboken pier fire,” he said, recalling the June 1900 disaster involving four steamships, “300 lives were lost in spite of efforts of a competent fire department supplied with the most complete apparatus. No amount of apparatus and the perfection of fire drill would have saved the Slocum for the fire had become a raging inferno before it was discovered.”

  The next day, Judge Edward Thomas charged the jury and dismissed them to deliberate. Twenty-five minutes later they returned with a verdict. The swift decision surprised everyone, including Judge Thomas, who’d gone to lunch, and it was some time before the verdict was announced. While he waited anxiously, Van Schaick received congratulations from friends and supporters who believed the maxim that brief deliberations invar
iably mean acquittal. Also aware of this maxim, the Liebenows and other survivors sat tensely awaiting the official word.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” asked the court clerk.

  “We have,” replied the foreman. On the first and second counts involving the death of the Slocum’s steward, Michael McGrann, and an anonymous passenger referred to as Rachel Roe, they found Van Schaick not guilty. On the third count of criminal negligence for failing to ensure that the Slocum had a crew properly trained in emergency procedures and an adequate supply of safety equipment, however, they found him “guilty as charged.”

  While murmurs of approval mixed with gasps of surprise among the spectators, the captain sat stoically. Given the vilification he had received since the disaster, he had prepared himself for the worst. But Lundberg’s mistrials and the gradual cooling of the public’s passions regarding the tragedy allowed him to harbor hopes of an acquittal. Now that he’d been found guilty, the only question that remained was the length of his sentence. A few minutes after the jury’s announcement, Judge Thomas called the old captain up to the railing. “You have been convicted on a very serious neglect of your duty,” intoned the judge. “I sentence you to ten years’ imprisonment.”

  The harsh sentence of ten years in Sing Sing Prison prompted divergent responses among the public and press. Several jurors conceded that had they known what was in store for the captain, they would have voted for acquittal on all counts. “We felt sorry for the old man,” one of them told a reporter. The Times, one of the loudest voices calling for justice to be served in the Slocum incident, declared the captain a scapegoat. The corrupt owners and inspectors who allowed the firetrap to carry passengers have eluded justice, while the captain “falls into the hands of justice, and he gets it untempered with any degree of mercy.” Van Schaick simply declared, “The United States Government made me the scapegoat.”

  But nearly all the survivors and relatives of victims deemed the verdict and sentence appropriate, as did several papers. “The sentence pronounced yesterday upon Captain Van Schaick,” opined the World, “is severe but just.” It will send a message to all steamboat captains that negligence regarding passenger safety will not be tolerated. Still, the World demanded that prosecutors “punish the greater guilt of the owners.”

  The old captain was allowed to remain free on bail while his lawyers appealed the verdict. Two years would pass before the United States Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict and ordered Van Schaick to prison. During that time Van Schaick moved to a farm in upstate New York and married Grace M. Spratt, the nurse and former love he’d been reunited with while recuperating in the hospital. On February 27, 1908, he kissed his bride and hugged his son and entered Sing Sing Prison. Although his sentence ended with the dramatic phrase “at hard labor,” the aged mariner was quickly put to work in the prison greenhouse. Prisoner 57855 grew to be well-liked by fellow inmates and guards whose companionship, coupled with hopes of an early release, kept him in good health.

  Meanwhile, his defenders, led by his indefatigable wife, launched a campaign to have him pardoned. “Anyone who thinks we’re throwing in the sponge is dead wrong,” she told a reporter. “We’ll battle to the last gasp, take another breath and go on fighting.” Joining her in the struggle was the American Association of Masters, Mates, and Pilots, the group that in 1903 had presented Van Schaick with an award for his exemplary safety record. The captain was one of their own, and the association felt duty bound to stop what they viewed as his unjust persecution. Their letter-writing appeal brought a flood of correspondence to President Roosevelt from citizens across the country, including prominent clerics, newspaper editors, labor union leaders, and reformers. Their petition drive garnered a quarter million signatures, which they promptly sent to the president. Charles Dersch and the Organization of the General Slocum Survivors countered with a campaign of their own, but mobilized only a fraction of the number. Roosevelt mulled the pardon request over, and after consulting with the Justice Department, rejected it. Van Schaick’s supporters never flagged, however, and kept up their campaign until August 26, 1911, when the federal parole board voted to release Van Schaick.

  It was a Saturday morning, and Van Schaick was working in the greenhouse when word arrived that the warden wanted to see him. “Captain,” the warden greeted him, “I’ve got good news for you.” The old man, aware that he was up for parole consideration, looked at him with anticipation. “Here are the papers making you a free man,” the warden continued. “You can leave the prison whenever you like.”

  Several hours later, Van Schaick stepped off a train in Grand Central Station and proceeded immediately to a West 98th Street boardinghouse for a tearful reunion with his wife.

  The next day reporters came calling, and Van Schaick was eager to talk about everything—the fire, the trial, prison, and his plans. At one point a reporter asked him if he harbored any ill will toward those who had put him in prison and fought to keep him there. “Lord bless you, not a soul,” he replied without hesitation. “I haven’t a grudge against anyone.”

  Weeks later Van Schaick and his wife moved to a farm near Troy, New York, purchased for him by his supporters in the National Board of Steam Navigation and the American Association of Masters, Mates and Pilots. He lived there another fifteen years and died at the Masonic Home in Utica, New York, on December 9, 1927, at the age of ninety.

  GHOSTS OF DREAMS PASSED AWAY

  Captain Van Schaick’s parole was yet another bitter disappointment to Dersch and the Organization of Slocum Survivors in their quest for justice. More than a thousand of their loved ones were gone and now no one—not Lundberg, not Van Schaick, and not Barnaby (charges against him were dropped in 1908)—would be made to pay for their role in the disaster. The public side of the ordeal was rapidly coming to a close and they were powerless to stop it.

  On December 4 the hull of the General Slocum, now a coal barge named Maryland, foundered and sank to its final resting place off Atlantic City, New Jersey. “Ill fortune always followed her,” remarked her owner. “I’m glad she’s gone.”

  Three weeks later, as the survivors and relatives of the victims of the Slocum disaster endured their seventh Christmas Day without their loved ones, President Taft’s formal pardon of Van Schaick became official. Exonerated of all guilt in the disaster and restored to full citizenship, he was free to live out his days in peace. No such remedy awaited the people whose lives were destroyed by the horror of June 15, 1904. Theirs was an ordeal not ended by the stroke of a pen. Nothing—neither time, nor for tune, nor faith, nor new love—would remove the painful memories of the disaster that swept away friends, spouses, and children. All they could hope for were the moments when happy memories of those now gone temporarily brightened what poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox called the perpetual “midnight of sorrow.” In this sense, their memories were not merely a burden to bear, but also a source of strength that enabled them to persevere in spite of their experience. As Wilcox put it in one of her poems:

  I would not forget you. I live to remember

  The beautiful hopes that bloomed but to decay,

  And brighter than June glows the bleakest December,

  When peopled with ghosts of the dreams passed away.

  LEGACY

  Despite the best efforts of Charles Dersch and the Organization of the General Slocum Survivors, public memory of the disaster faded with astonishing speed. Only seven years later it was replaced as the city’s great fire when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burned. There were similarities between the two fires—both involved immigrants and mostly female victims and both aroused public wrath. But the Triangle fire’s death toll was 85 percent lower than the Slocum’s. How then did it become the “fire of fires” in New York’s and the nation’s memory?

  Several factors begin to explain this remarkable legacy. First, there was the context. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire occurred at a time of intense labor struggle, especially in the garment trad
es. Only a year before, tens of thousands of shirtwaist makers had staged a huge strike for better wages, hours, and conditions. Now 146 of them lay dead and there was no question as to who was to blame. This conclusion was reinforced when the public learned that the factory owners had locked the exits to keep the women at their machines, an act that seemed more sinister and nakedly greedy than cutting corners with safety equipment as with the owners of the Slocum.

  Second, the Slocum disaster was, in the words of several newspaper reporters at the time, a “concentrated tragedy.” The great majority of those killed were from a single parish and lived within a forty-block area. Their fellow New Yorkers were horrified and outraged by the tragedy, but only a relative handful were directly affected.

  Third, the onset of World War I eradicated sympathy for anything German, including the innocent victims of the General Slocum fire. Newspaper articles covering the annual June 15 commemoration ceased abruptly in 1914 and did not reappear until 1920. By then, as the Triangle fire became firmly entrenched in the American memory, all that remained of the General Slocum fire was an ever-shrinking annual commemoration at the Lutheran cemetery in Middle Village, Queens.