by Ed O'Donnell
Still, the Slocum didn’t disappear entirely. Now and again the story resurfaced, usually in the aftermath of a succeeding catastrophe like the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 (ca. 1,500 killed), the sinking of the Empress of Ireland in May 1914 (1,012 killed), and the capsizing of the Eastland in Chicago in July 1915 (844 killed). The latter incident was eerily reminiscent of the Slocum disaster because it was a charter excursion for Western Electric employees and their families. The top-heavy steamer rolled over at the pier and sank in minutes. Ironically, it was the addition of extra lifeboats on the top deck in the wake of the Titanic sinking that led to the disaster. Even in the news coverage of this event, the Slocum received only passing mention, generally for death toll comparisons and discussions of corporate liability.
In the 1920s the Slocum story achieved a bit of immortality when James Joyce included a half-page reference to it in his monumental work Ulysses, first published in 1922. The novel is set in a single day, June 16, 1904, the day following the Slocum horror, and chronicles the misadventures of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish Dubliner. At one point one of the characters walks into a bar and strikes up a conversation with the bartender about news of the day.
Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the firehose all burst. What I can’t understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that…. Now, you’re talking straight, Mr Crimmins. You know why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look at that. And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we were bad here.
I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn’t that true? That’s a fact.
Graft, my dear sir. Well, of course, where there’s money going there’s always someone to pick it up.
Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness masterpiece has fascinated and frustrated readers ever since its publication. Scholars have pored over every word and phrase in an attempt to decipher their meaning. Joyce’s reference to the Slocum disaster is one of the most overt clues as to the day in which it takes place. As a result, each year on June 16, Joyce devotees around the world celebrate “Bloomsday” with readings, festivals, and plays in honor of the Dublin writer and his most famous work.
The Slocum story gained a different sort of immortality in 1934 when it was splashed upon the silver screens all across America in the film Manhattan Melodrama. It opened with a stunning (by 1934 special effects standards) reenactment of the fire as a setup for a story about the lives of two East Side boys. Orphaned by the disaster, they face an upbringing of hardship and trial. One boy (played by William Powell) achieves Horatio Alger success, becoming a crusading district attorney. The other, “Blackie” Gallagher (played by Clark Gable), however, turns to a life of crime. Ultimately there is a showdown between the Slocum orphans. The most striking thing about the treatment of the Slocum story in the film is its transformation from a German church outing to an Irish neighborhood excursion. Passengers are seen enjoying food and drink aboard the boat, listening to the wistful melody of the Irish-American favorite “The Sidewalks of New York.” One of the many film fans who turned out in July 1934 to see Manhattan Melodrama was gangster John Dillinger (accompanied by the “Lady in Red”). He went down in a hail of FBI bullets as he exited the theater.
In 1940, after holding out longer than anyone could have imagined possible, St. Mark’s parish on East Sixth Street closed its doors for good. It soon reopened as a Jewish synagogue, an institution more reflective of the neighborhood’s population. The remnant of the St. Mark’s congregation worshiped in several Lutheran churches uptown before formally merging with Zion Lutheran on East 84th Street. Zion-St. Mark’s parish still exists today (as does the synagogue on East Sixth Street), though its congregation once again numbers only about one hundred.
No doubt at the prompting of the Organization of the General Slocum Survivors, the New-York Historical Society decided in 1954 to curate a small exhibit to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the disaster. It opened Friday, June 11, with a ceremony that included twelve survivors. An article in the Herald Tribune included a large photograph of them, now aged 51 to 85, standing in formal attire around a ship’s wheel. The reporter observed how the men and women mainly talked about how beautiful the weather had been on June 15, 1904, and about wearing fancy clothes, playing bean ball, and eagerly awaiting the opening of the picnic baskets being guarded by their mothers. “They all recalled the holocaust all right,” he noted, “—and some still have horrible scars from it—but they discussed the fire as if it seemed unreal fifty years afterwards.”
Perhaps it was the news coverage that attended the fiftieth anniversary or a chance conversation with some relatives, but not long after the New- York Historical Society exhibit closed, Claude Rust began to research the Slocum disaster and conduct interviews with survivors. His maternal grandmother, Charlotte May, was killed on the excursion, and he developed a passionate desire to know more about it. After more than twenty years of research, he published in 1981 The Burning of the General Slocum, the first credible account of the disaster.
By then only a dozen or so survivors were still alive, and membership in the Organization of the General Slocum Survivors had so dwindled, it had all but ceased to function. The Queens Historical Society formed a Slocum Memorial Committee to keep the annual June 15 commemorations going. The disaster’s eightieth anniversary in 1984 prompted the Times to send a reporter to the service in Queens. His article, “Years After Ship Fire, Captain’s Role Debated,” included interviews with survivors who both blamed and sympathized with Captain Van Schaick. For the former, eight decades had done little to erase the bitterness of the ordeal.
In the early 1990s the job of preserving the memory of the Slocum disaster increasingly fell to men and women with no connection to the event other than sympathy and fascination. Frank Duffy, executive vice president of the Maritime Industry Museum at the SUNY Maritime College, got involved as a result of his love of maritime history. Soon the Slocum story became a major part of his research and writing, a development that led him to spearhead a drive in the late 1980s to restore a memorial fountain erected long ago in Tompkins Square Park in honor of the children who died on the Slocum.Ever since its rededication in 1991, Duffy has remained active in the effort to keep the Slocum story alive. In 1997, Duffy convinced the Parks Department to hold an annual memorial ceremony at the fountain on June 15. The short, moving ceremony usually draws fifty or so people, most of whom are members of the media and the curious, plus a handful of descendants of survivors and victims.
The 1990s also saw the establishment of a new organization, the General Slocum Memorial Association, for the planning of the annual commemoration at Trinity Lutheran Church and the nearby cemetery in Middle Village, Queens. Ken Leib, a German-American with no connection to the tragedy (though he recently began researching a possible relative), joined the association in 1998 and soon became its president. He successfully steered the annual memorial service in Queens in a more ecumenical direction where not only victims and survivors are remembered, but also the heroes and caregivers. Leib has also involved the children of nearby Intermediate School 93, who over the past few years have written a poem and play (each read and performed at the annual memorial service), designed and made a memorial quilt, developed a pop-up book, and recorded a radio feature about the Slocum. Participants in the memorial service seem especially taken with the fact that nearly all the children are of immigrant or minority heritage.
The Queens ceremony tends to draw more people than its Tompkins Square counterpart, though Duffy and Leib do not see their respective events as competitive. They work closely together to plan them and generally hold them on separate days. Even with a larger turnout, the Que
ens ceremony draws only a small number of descendants of survivors. The only living survivor, Adella Liebenow Wotherspoon, despite her advanced age (ninety-eight at the 2002 event), almost always makes it.
The release of the 1997 blockbuster film Titanic sparked renewed interest in the Slocum story as many newspapers and magazines drew the inevitable comparisons between the events. This was also a time when, as a result of New York City’s giddy emergence from three decades of rising crime, budget crises, and crumbling infrastructure, New Yorkers and Americans in general were taking a growing interest in the city’s history. Suddenly a city that had long prided itself on paying no attention to the past was awash in books, museum exhibitions, walking tours, and documentaries chronicling its history. The apotheosis of this trend came in late 2000 with the release of Ric Burns’s New York: A Documentary Film, a twelve-hour PBS special. While it made no mention of the Slocum fire, the film’s companion book did include a special feature on the tragedy.
One month before the Burns documentary aired, in October 2000, internationally recognized marine explorer and fiction writer Clive Cussler located the wreck of the Slocum, a.k.a. the barge Maryland, off the New Jersey shore near Atlantic City where it sank in 1911. Cussler, whose discovery of the Confederate submarine Hunley off South Carolina is considered one of the great marine archaeology finds of the twentieth century, is not interested in treasure or artifacts. His organization, the National Underwater Marine Agency, or NUMA, is a nonprofit committed “to preserving our maritime heritage through the discovery, archaeological survey and conservation of shipwreck artifacts.” The wrecked boat, he hopes, will remain undisturbed for all time.
The most recent event to bring the Slocum story back before the public, of course, was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Journalists scrambled to find events with which to compare the devastation and loss of life. Inevitably, the most obvious comparison in national history was with the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Closer to home, however, it was the General Slocum disaster that journalists, politicians, and historians turned to for comparisons—especially when it came to considering what type of memorial to build. Ultimately the WTC attack and Slocum fire were quite different events. One was a willful act of destruction and murder akin to a military strike except that all the victims were civilians. The other was a tragedy born of negligence, greed, and just plain bad luck. Still, there were too many parallels to ignore. The most obvious was the profound shock and horror felt by the people of New York, especially those who lost loved ones. No tragedy in the city’s four- hundred-year history comes close to the carnage of these two events, and no others produced a greater outpouring of sympathy and sorrow. Another obvious parallel was the selfless heroism exhibited both by uniformed personnel and everyday people on the scene. Although no rescuers died in the Slocum fire, many risked their lives so that others might live. Such was the case on a larger scale and with more dire consequences on 9/11.
Other parallels emerged the closer one looked. In both cases, relatives of those missing rushed to find and display photographs of their loved ones. In 1904, photo reproduction technology was slow and expensive, so searchers carried their original photos and held them out to people, hoping someone could provide some information. In 2001 the city was awash in color copies of broadsheets showing photos of the missing and contact information. Both proved futile.
In both 9/11 and the Slocum fire people turned to poetry as a way to express their pain, sorrow, and anger. In the former case, thousands of poems began appearing on websites, in newspapers, and at curbside memorials just hours after the towers collapsed. In the latter, we know that at least one man, a simple bartender named Paul Liebenow, turned to the emotive poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox for solace. Doubtless many more did as well.
The public reaction to the tragedies was likewise similar: they opened their wallets. Both 1904 and 2001 saw huge amounts of money garnered from New Yorkers as well as Americans across the nation. For people wanting to do something tangible to aid the sufferers, giving to the relief funds became the obvious choice. Sadly, this shared aspect produced still another point of similarity—embarrassing squabbles over the distribution of relief money.
In both September 2001 and June 1904 the city’s mayor emerged as a central figure to whom people looked for leadership and reassurance. The nation, indeed the world, marveled at Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s superb handling of the crisis, both from an operational standpoint in coordinating the relief effort and from a symbolic and rhetorical one through his words of resolve. George B. McClellan, Jr., provided much the same dual service to the people of New York in the summer of 1904, but with a far lower profile in keeping with the strict standards of propriety that governed the actions of public officials in that era. Still, McClellan, like Giuliani, was widely hailed for his leadership during the crisis.
Both events left behind thousands of people whose lives would never again be the same. As in the aftermath of any disaster, people who lost children, sisters, brothers, parents, and extended family, not to mention friends, colleagues, and neighbors, were left to struggle with the pain and sorrow of their loss. For some this emotional trauma was compounded by “survivor’s guilt,” condemning the living to forever ask why them and not me? Just as most Slocum survivors and relatives of victims somehow found the strength to carry on with their lives, those directly affected by 9/11 are striving to do the same. Not all succeeded in the case of the Slocum, as evidenced by the many suicides and cases of people drinking themselves to death. Not surprisingly, the devastation of 9/11 has already produced its first reports of suicides.
A final parallel between the catastrophes of 1904 and 2001 concerns the effort to build fitting memorials to the victims. Two memorials were constructed in the wake of the Slocum tragedy, the monument in the Lutheran cemetery unveiled in 1905 and a small fountain placed in Tompkins Square Park (in Little Germany) in 1906. While final questions of design and form regarding a 9/11 memorial remain unresolved, it is certain that one will be built on the site of the World Trade Center towers.
Behind these and all similar initiatives lies a threefold goal: to honor the dead, provide the living with a place of contemplation and remembrance, and ensure that society never forgets what happened. Yet as the Slocum survivors discovered, as will someday the descendants of 9/11 victims, all three are honorable goals, but only the first two are ultimately achievable. Monuments can keep alive the historical memory of events like the Johnstown Flood, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 for centuries to come. The actual memory of these and other traumatic events like the Slocum fire, however, lives on only in the hearts and minds of those who experienced them. They are not transferable—despite the best efforts of survivors and descendants—from one generation to the next. With the death at age 100 in February 2004 of Adella Liebenow Wotherspoon, the last survivor of the Slocum fire, the tragedy can no longer be remembered in any real way. It now exists for succeeding generations not as a memory, but rather as a cautionary tale of greed and carelessness and a story of unspeakable loss and extraordinary courage.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Where to begin when it comes to thanking all the people who helped make this book possible? I’ll start with my diligent team of researchers led by the indefatigable and extraordinary April White of KnowMore Research.com and also including Joan Koster- Morales, Reza Tehranifar, and Catherine Sarubbi. No request, no matter how obscure, seemed beyond their ability to track down an answer. Ursula Pawlowski and Mary Beth Snodgrass deserve recognition for their work compiling an exhaustive database of General Slocum victims and survivors, as do Sean Costello and Ryan Shanahan for their work building the web- site www.General-Slocum.com. I also need to thank Kathy Kirk Rooney and Joan Banach for their typing services and Joel Villa and John Buckingham for help with scanning pictures.
My research into the Slocum tragedy benefited immeasurably from the extraordinary resources and r
esearch staffs at the National Archives and Records Administration, New-York Historical Society, Queens Historical Society, New York City Municipal Archives, and New York Public Library. I especially want to thank Warren Platt at the NYPL for his help in tracking down answers to several important questions.
I was very fortunate to come into contact with several people involved in Slocum-related projects who proved very generous with their time. Documentary filmmakers Hank Linhart and Phil Dray took time from making the definitive documentary on the Slocum tragedy to answer many questions and provide me with invaluable tapes of interviews with survivors they conducted over the years. Frank Duffy and Ken Leib, leaders in the ongoing effort to hold annual memorial services in honor of the Slocum victims and heroes, answered all my questions and provided me with important research leads. The same must be said for Kathy Jolowicz and Karen Lamberton, two women engaged in their own research into the Slocum story.
Enough cannot be said of the vital role played by survivor Adella Liebenow Wotherspoon in the writing of this book. She graciously welcomed me into her home and answered every question I put to her. She also let me look at the scrapbook her father, Paul Liebenow, made in the wake of the tragedy that claimed his two older daughters. Similarly, Betty Reilly and Maureen Enright, the daughter and granddaughter of Slocum survivor Catherine Gallagher Connelly, endured my many phone calls and answered all my questions.
Many descendants of victims and survivors likewise offered much valuable information. These include: William H. Manz (for information on the Mueller family), Eugene F. Kelleher (Police Officer John A. Scheuing), Judith Loebel (the Halley family), Richard K. Cross (Wilhelmina Rauch), Candy Twynham (the Rheinfrank family), Joan Colvin (the Knell family), Patricia Lawrence (Michael McGrann), Charles C. Bothur (James C. Ward), Linda Slocum (the Oellrich family), Robert J. Zipse (the Zipse family), Marion Andrews (the Firneisen family), Mark Rosenholz (Sylvia Harris), and Joann Schmidt, Carol Bollinger, and Karen Lamberton (the Muth, Hessel, and Schnitzler families). Claude Rust, who lost his grandmother in the Slocum tragedy and wrote the first credible book about the event, wrote to offer me help in the spring of 2002, but died before we could meet.