Dark Tide (14 page)

The next day was designated “Victory Day” in Massachusetts by Governor Samuel Walker McCall, one of his last acts before he left the corner office to Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts lieutenant governor who won the state’s top executive office in elections that were held a little more than a week before the armistice. More than a million spectators clogged Boston’s downtown streets for the Victory Day parade, “the largest out-pouring of humanity that ever watched a parade in this city,” the
Boston Globe
reported.

The armistice had occurred at the right time for Bostonians, who needed a reason to celebrate after they, and much of the world, had endured a dreadful 1918 autumn battling an influenza epidemic that first showed up in early September. In a little more than two months, it had wreaked havoc of biblical proportions. When it was over, more than five hundred thousand Americans would lie dead, and estimates ranged from 20 million to 100 million worldwide. More than 25 percent of the U.S. population became ill, and an estimated eighteen thousand servicemen died of the virus; the government estimated that it would pay the beneficiaries of soldiers and sailors a total of $170 million in insurance premiums.

In Boston, the horror started in late August when sailors aboard a training ship at Commonwealth Pier had come down with the flu, and by early September, thousands of soldiers at Fort Devens had contracted the disease. The army camp became a scene out of hell. One doctor wrote in a letter: “Camp Devens has about 50,000 men, or did before this epidemic broke loose. The flu has developed so rapidly that the camp is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till it has passed … One can stand to see one, two, or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths a day, and still keeping it up.”

By October the flu was rampaging through Boston with the alarming death rates hitting the North End particularly hard. Congested tenements, a lack of fresh air, and cold buildings all added to the spread of the flu.

Across the city, theaters, clubs, and other social gathering spots were shut down. Boston schools were ordered closed when the death toll in Boston climbed to more than two hundred victims. One prominent Boston historian noted that, with the death toll rising so fast and gravediggers becoming scarce, circus tents were used to cover stacks of unburied coffins in local cemeteries. By the first of November, the epidemic began to subside, although doctors attributed a small recurrence later in the month to the number of people who crowded onto the city’s subway trains.

By the time of the armistice on November 11, Bostonians were ready to express their joy after two months of misery. The Victory Day parade was as much a celebration of the waning influenza plague as it was the end of the war.

In the offices of U.S. Industrial Alcohol, Arthur P. Jell viewed both the influenza epidemic and the armistice from a different perspective. Many of his Cambridge employees had become sick from the flu, a few had died, and his production schedule had been totally disrupted. But he had a bigger challenge. Since the late summer, munitions demand had been dropping. Now that the war had ended, USIA had to find additional sources of revenue to tide it over until the country could fully make the transition to a peacetime economy, and the demand for nonmilitary industrial alcohol grew again.

Company executives, with full support from Jell, decided that they could retool the Cambridge plant’s manufacturing processes to produce grain alcohol for the rum and liquor industries. USIA had produced some grain alcohol early in its existence, prior to its shift to industrial alcohol, and Jell was sure they could do so successfully again.

But even this strategy represented a timing challenge, one that had to be managed carefully for the company to benefit. After years of momentum, it now appeared certain that a Prohibition amendment would be ratified shortly by three-quarters of the states and that an 18th amendment would be added to the U.S. Constitution, banning the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

The influence of the Anti-Saloon League, a temperance organization that began operations in 1893, had grown stronger in the second decade of the twentieth century. In December 1913, a parade of more than four thousand Leaguers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., singing temperance songs. League speakers, some twenty thousand strong, spoke at gatherings across the country. Letters and telegrams “rolled into Congress by the tens of thousands, burying members like an avalanche,” according to Wayne Wheeler, lobbyist for the league. The league viewed Prohibition as a way to reduce crime, poverty rates, and taxes created by prisons and poorhouses, as well as improve health and hygiene, the economy, and the quality of life in America.

The World War had accelerated the cause. The frenzy of feeling against the Germans and support for American boys in uniform gave the league a tool to use against the saloons, since most of the brewers were of German extraction. “Kaiserism abroad and booze at home must go,” Wayne Wheeler said. The League also argued that resources used for the production of alcoholic beverages were being diverted from the war efforts.

Jell knew that Prohibition would hurt the alcohol distillers while encouraging black market production. Nonetheless, if the 18th amendment were ratified, the law called for Prohibition to actually take effect after a one-year grace period, beginning in early 1920. That gave USIA a narrow window of opportunity. If it could distill enough grain alcohol in the first quarter of 1919, there would be ample time to ship it to brewers, and for them to distribute liquor to saloons and stores, before Prohibition slammed the window closed. In mid-November 1918, Jell had ordered another huge shipment of molasses from Cuba—it was due to arrive in mid-January of 1919. He would spend the time between now and then closing the books on 1918 and preparing a round-the-clock production schedule in anticipation of the January molasses shipment.

He would also have the big molasses tank on the Commercial Street wharf caulked one more time. White, his superintendent on the site, said molasses continued to leak steadily from many of the seams. Caulking would be a good idea before any new molasses was pumped into the tank. Jell had hired a caulking crew that would begin work in early December.

All in all, he was glad 1918 was winding to a close. It had been a good year for USIA, but business had begun to slow in the late summer. The end of the war had injected uncertainty into a business that had grown swiftly in the past three years. The influenza plague had been frightening, and he was not sure it had completely ended. Anarchists had the city on edge. That pesky Gonzales had created disturbances with his strange warnings and even stranger behavior; the odd man’s resignation from USIA was about the best thing that happened in 1918.

It had been three years since Jell had shepherded the Commercial Street molasses tank to completion, and throughout the war, he had managed the East Cambridge distilling plant flawlessly, meeting USIA’s daunting production quotas and helping the company achieve record profits. Assuming the molasses steamer arrived on time in mid-January, the new year also promised to get off to a strong start. Jell believed 1919 would be the year his loyalty and hard work would pay off in his long-awaited vice presidency and his transfer to USIA’s New York headquarters.

Yes, 1919 was
his
year. Arthur P. Jell could feel it.

FIVE

John Urquhart, a boilermaker for Walter W. Fields & Sons in Cambridge, knew ten days ago when he first started caulking the Commercial Street molasses tank that he would have a difficult job ahead of him. Molasses leaked from several different seams, squeezing through the rivets and sliding down the steel walls like lazy brown rivers, plopping onto the pavement below and spreading slowly into thick pools. When Urquhart first washed the molasses off, pinheads of the dark liquid reappeared instantly on the lap seams, like blood refilling a cut.

Urquhart had been busier than ever during the last few months, and the influenza epidemic had disrupted his schedule by depleting his best crews. Many of his finest workers had become ill or had died, and Urquhart had been forced to hire men who were less skilled and less reliable. There had been complaints from some of his customers, so he had decided to undertake his most important jobs alone. This had given him peace of mind, but had set him back on some of his key projects. The Commercial Street molasses tank was one of these. It probably should have been caulked earlier, but he was not able to begin the job until December 10, and, because he worked alone, it had taken him twice as long. For ten straight days, as raw wind whipped off the inner harbor, stinging his eyes and burning his face, he washed the stubborn molasses off with hot water, caulked the seams with his tools, then washed the pinheads again and recaulked.

Working alone on this job, perched on a rigging chair high above the ground, John Urquhart had had plenty of time to think. It had only been a month since the whole city and the entire country were celebrating the end of the war, and already, things were starting to change for the worse. Like the molasses oozing stealthily across the pavement below him, Urquhart believed that the pain and fear caused by the flu epidemic was spreading into other areas, too.

Many men were out of work, and Urquhart knew that two factors were responsible for it. First, war industries—mainly steel plants and munitions companies—were retooling their factories or shutting down abruptly. Urquhart had read that these industries employed 9 million workers, and he wondered where they would all go. Second, soldiers and sailors were already starting to return home; 4 million men would return to America, forty thousand to Boston alone. Would there be jobs for them? Would they expect factories to hire them out of gratitude for their service and fire other men? How could the factories hire anyone if they were closing down?

And then there were the labor unions. Urquhart knew many union men, and knew also that the big organizers, like tough-talking Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, were already threatening strikes if wages or work hours were cut.

Everyone was concerned about prices, too. The Boston Elevated had just raised its fares from seven to eight cents; Urquhart remembered that it was only five cents two years ago. The price of coal was going up, and so was the cost of clothing and food.

It seemed to Urquhart that last month’s victory celebrations may have hidden many problems that were lurking just below the surface. Now those problems were squeezing their way out, just like the molasses inside this tank, and he didn’t think there was any equivalent of caulking that could push them back in. Some workers on the Commercial Street wharf had whispered that U.S. Industrial Alcohol should scrap this tank and build a new one that didn’t leak. Urquhart thought the same about the economy; that the country would now have to scrap its reliance on war production and replace it with something new to accommodate all the working men without jobs. Otherwise there could be trouble.