Ship Ablaze

by Ed O'Donnell

  Others deserving of thanks include Elliott Wilshaw and Robert Wilson for providing photographs from their personal collections, Reverend Wolf and Stella Kaufmann of Zion-St. Mark’s Parish for information about the history of St. Mark’s Church, Rev. Ed Vodoklys, S.J., for help with some difficult German translations, Dennis R. Yeager, Esq., for assistance in understanding the legal process ca. 1904, and Dr. Paige Reynolds for answering questions pertaining to James Joyce and Ulysses.I am similarly indebted to New York City firefighters Tom Cashin and Frank Thurlow, who, along with Dr. Vytenis Babrauskas of Fire Science and Technology, Inc., and Jonathan Klopman, an independent marine surveyor based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, shared with me their vital knowledge of the nature of fires and firefighting. I also need to thank my graduate school mentor, Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University and the New-York Historical Society, under whose tutelage I developed a love of New York City history and first learned of the story of the General Slocum.

  Recognition must also go to Juan Valdez for supplying the coffee, without which this book would never have been written.

  I must also thank my editor at Broadway Books, Charlie Conrad, and his able assistant, Alison Presley, for all their insight, guidance, and last- minute troubleshooting. Special thanks must also go to my agent, friend, and mentor John Wright, who despite suffering terrible loss on 9/11, saw the project through to completion.

  And most important of all, I must thank my wife, Stephanie, whose love and faith carried me along through the many late nights and lost weekends sacrificed in writing this book. I didn’t have to write a book about a terrible tragedy in order to be reminded how truly blessed I am.

  ABOUT THE SOURCES

  Acomplete and detailed set of footnotes for this book is available at www.general-slocum.com and in hard copy format at the New- York Historical Society, New York Public Library, Queens Historical Society, Museum of the City of New York, and City University of New York, Gotham Center.

  This book is based almost entirely on primary sources—that is, documents and records generated around the time of the General Slocum disaster in June 1904. Despite the fact that no victim, survivor, or rescuer left a diary or significant set of personal papers, I was able to draw upon a vast array of documents and sources that allowed me to piece together not just the overall story but several personal portraits. The foundational resources for my research were New York City’s daily newspapers, in particular the World, Times, Tribune, Sun, Herald, Journal, and the German-language Staats-Zeitung. Owing to the enormity of the event, they provided exhaustive coverage of the fire, rescues, recovery effort, funerals, and trials. Throughout the disaster and its aftermath, the papers competed with each other to provide the most minute details, often in the form of lengthy interviews with survivors and rescuers. Later, when the legal proceedings against the Slocum’s captain, crew, and owners took place, the daily press printed lengthy transcripts of the testimony in which witnesses described their ordeals in great detail (indeed, these are the only transcripts of the hearings and trials that survive, as all the original records were destroyed). It is from these personal accounts, from people like Annie Weber and Reverend George Haas, that I was able to reconstruct a narrative that included vivid details and extensive dialogue (all dialogue comes from these sources, or interviews; none is manufactured) of the fire, rescues, scenes at the morgue, funerals, and trials. Remarkably, many of these newspaper accounts are collected in three “instant” books published in 1904 and accompanied by numerous photographs: John Wesley Hanson, Jr., New York’s Awful Excursion Boat Horror (Chicago, 1904); Henry Davenport Northrup, New York’s Awful Steamboat Horror (Philadelphia, 1904); and John S. Ogilvie, History of the General Slocum Disaster (New York, 1904).

  Even though the Slocum fire is nearly a century old, I was able to draw upon the memories of two survivors, Adella Liebenow Wotherspoon and Catherine Gallagher Connelly. The latter, aged 107 by the time I began my research, was too frail to interview, but the details of her ordeal as an eleven-year-old aboard the ill-fated ship were captured in two video interviews I was fortunate enough to gain access to. Her daughter, Mrs. Betty Reilly, and granddaughter, Maureen Enright, were able to provide additional detail. Wotherspoon, only six months old at the time of the fire, obviously has no specific “memory” of the fire, but she grew up in a household shattered by the event (her two older sisters, two cousins, and an aunt were killed). More important, she possessed a scrapbook of news clippings and personal records compiled by her father—as close to a diary as I came in trying to understand the inner pain of those who survived. Nearly as important was the information provided by the many descendants of victims, survivors, and rescuers. Death and birth certificates, federal census tracts, and city directories filled in the remaining details.

  I also relied on a vast amount of information contained in a number of published government reports related to the fire. The Annual Report of the New York City Department of Public Charities for 1904, for example, in cluded the most comprehensive record of those on the General Slocum on June 15, 1904, and their fate. Included in this report were full names, addresses, death certificate numbers, and the names of hospitals to which survivors were admitted. The Report of the United States Commission of the Investigation upon the Disaster to the Steamer General Slocum, October 8, 1904 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), the product of an investigation ordered by President Theodore Roosevelt in the wake of the tragedy, offered a careful summary of the fire as well as a stinging indictment of the United States Steamboat Inspection Service and its shortcomings. A later document, “Bill H.R. 4154 for the Relief of the Victims of the General Slocum Disaster,” published by the U.S. Congress, House Committee on Claims in 1910, likewise provided a detailed catalog of information regarding each family (including occupations and incomes) and its fate. Because this document was compiled six years after the fire, it added new information such as the fact that certain survivors had subsequently died of their injuries, committed suicide, or gone insane. Annual reports of the New York City Board of Health, Fire Department, and Police Department (all New York: Martin Brown Press, 1905) also added important perspectives and details.

  Since the flawed inspection of the General Slocum was a crucial element of the story, I pored over the records of the U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service found at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. These included voluminous correspondence received and generated by the USSIS both before and after the Slocum fire—letters that provided a window into the agency’s culture of corruption and overall ineffectiveness in protecting lives and property. Other important records included the Annual Report of the Supervising Inspector General, 1900–1910 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900–1910), U.S. Civil Service Commission, Information Concerning Examination for Entrance to the Steamboat Inspection Service (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), and the U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service, General Rules and Regulations (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904).

  My insight into St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and the surrounding German community was based upon the parish archives now housed at Zion-St. Mark’s in Manhattan. Of particular importance in this collection was a brief history of the parish, Zion-St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: A History (published privately by the church, 1992), and biographical information of Reverend George Haas. Additional information on Haas came from the archives at Wagner College on Staten Island. The New-York Historical Society possesses an original copy of the Journal for the Seventeenth Annual Excursion St. Mark’s Evan. Lutheran Church, June 15, 1904, the program for the ill-fated trip that contained many significant details about the St. Mark’s community and the plans for the excursion. The N-YHS also holds a partial collection of the minutes of the regular meetings of the Organization of the General Slocum Survivors (1951–63), as well as a scrapbook of newspaper clippings relating to the disaster and records pertaining to rescuer Sam Berg, and the original (and s
ignificantly larger) manuscript of the autobiography of Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr., later published as The Gentleman and the Tiger: The Autobiography of George B. McClellan, Jr., edited by Harold C. Syrett (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1956). Details about the annual memorial services came from newspaper coverage and the collections of the Organization of the General Slocum Survivors, Annual Memorial Service Program, 1905+, held at the New York Public Library.

  Secondary sources also proved essential to the writing of this book. Three previously published books (in addition to the aforementioned three “instant books” published in 1904)—Werner Braatz and Joseph Starr, Fire on the River: The Story of the Burning of the General Slocum (n.p., 2000), Irving Werstein, The General Slocum Incident: Story of an Ill- Fated Ship (John Day Company, 1965), and Claude Rust, The Burning of the General Slocum (Elsevier/Nelson Books, 1981)—provided solid overviews of the disaster story. Books such as Bernard Dumpleton, The Story of the Paddle Steamer (Molksham, Venton, 1973), and William H. Ewen, Days of the Steamboats (Connecticut, 1988), likewise supplied valuable details on the emergence of the steamboat in the nineteenth century. Jerry O. Potter, The Sultana Tragedy: America’s Greatest Maritime Disaster (Pelican Pub Co., 1992), offered a key retelling of the ship catastrophe that occurred in 1865.

  For information regarding New York’s German community, I relied upon Stanley Nadol, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845–80 (Urbana, 1990); Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1820–1865 (South Bend, 1975); and Mario Maffi, Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnicity and Culture in New York’s Lower East Side (New York, 1995). Much valuable insight into the German immigrant experience in America came from Don Heinrich Tolzmann, The German-American Experience (Humanity Books, 2000). Contemporary articles such as Edward Steiner’s “The German Immigrant in America,” The Outlook, January 1903, shed light on the increasingly positive view Americans held of Germans by the turn of the century.

  Acquiring a deeper understanding of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century led me to Mike Wallace and Edwin Burroughs, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford, 1999), and David Hammack, Power and Society: Great New York at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1991). For specifies on the East River, Hell Gate, and the major maritime catastrophes that preceded the Slocum disaster, I turned to Jeanette Edwards Rattray, The Perils of the Port of New York (New York, 1973). Stanley Walker, City Editor (Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1934), and James Wyman Barrett, Joseph Pulitzer and His World (Vanguard, 1941), likewise illuminated the world of big-city newspapers in 1904.

  Terry Golway, So That Others Might Live: A History of New York’s Bravest, The FDNY from 1700 to the Present (Basic Books, 2002), offers the most valuable source on the larger history of fires and firefighting in New York City. Margaret Hindle Hazen and Robert M. Hazen’s book, Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American Culture, 1775–1925 (Princeton, 1992), proved invaluable in developing my awareness of the deep-seated fear of and obsession with fire most Americans had in 1904. Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (Lippincott, 1962), remains the best source for the most famous fire in the city’s history, while books by Richard Snow and John F. Kasson detail the rise of disaster spectacles at Coney Island, especially Fire and Flames.

  For details on the characteristics and behavior of fires, I relied upon the National Fire Protection Association’s NFPA 921, Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations (1995).

  I must add that some of my greatest insights into the nature of fire derived from interviews with Dr. Vytenis Babrauskas of Fire Science and Technology, Inc., and Jonathan Klopman, an independent marine surveyor based in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Edward T. O’Donnell is Associate Professor of American history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Irish American History (Broadway Books, 2002). He lives in Holden, Massachusetts, with his wife, Stephanie, and four daughters, Erin, Kelly, Michelle, and Katherine (and their dog, Molly). To learn more, please visit his website: www.EdwardTODonnell.com.

  Captain William Van Schaick (author’s collection)

  The General Slocum (Robert Wilson)

  The smoldering hull of the General Slocum (author’s collection)

  Bodies of the dead line the beach at North Brother Island. (author’s collection)

  Stacks of hastily constructed coffins at North Brother Island (author’s collection)

  Relatives search among the dead on display at the temporary morgue. (author’s collection)

  Black Saturday: the funeral procession of the unidentified dead, Saturday, June 18, 1904 (Gustav Scholer Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, The New York Public Library)

  Frank A. Barnaby, president of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company, which owned the General Slocum, testifies at the Coroner’s Investigation a week after the fire. (author’s collection)

  The hull of the General Slocum after its raising by a salvage crew (Steamship Historical Society)

  Rotten life preservers from the General Slocum. The stenciled date indicates they were thirteen years old at the time of the fire. (author’s collection)

  The memorial to the victims of the General Slocum fire, unveiled in 1905, in the cemetery in Middle Village, Queens (Elliott Wilshaw)

  SHIP ABLAZE. Copyright © 2003 by Edward T. O’Donnell.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

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  O’Donnell, Edward T., 1963–

  Ship ablaze: the tragedy of the steamboat General Slocum /

  Edward T. O’Donnell.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  1. General Slocum (Steamboat) 2. Fires—New York (State)— New York—History—20th century. 3. Ships—Fire and fire prevention— New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 4. New York (N.Y.)—History—1898–1951. I. Title.

  F128.5.O29 2003

  910′.9163′46—dc21 2002033008

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49087-2

  v3.0