Dark Tide (15 page)

He remembered the recession before the war. Men who worked with their hands had suffered the most, their families cold in the wintertime and hungry all year long. Today, the unions were stronger, workers resented the profits the big corporations were making, and soldiers and sailors returning from Europe would surely feel that their country owed them a living. Urquhart did not think that these people would tolerate hunger or cold or unemployment meekly or quietly. It made him feel a little queasy that President Wilson was in France to discuss peace in Europe even while tension and unrest were growing at home.

Urquhart knew that all of these issues were out of his control and would be decided by smarter men. What he
could
control was his handiwork on the molasses tank, and finally today, just a few days before Christmas, he had finished caulking. The tank was ready for the big molasses ship that was scheduled to arrive in mid-January and pump hundreds of thousands of gallons of molasses from its hold compartments. John Urquhart had been a boilermaker for fourteen years and was proud of his talent and his attention to detail. When a man paid him for a job, he did that job well, and the molasses tank was no different.

Urquhart climbed down from his rigging chair and looked up at the massive tank. He squinted against a pale-gray sky and let his eyes scan each seam, slowly, taking care not to confuse molasses with the rust-brown paint that covered the tank’s walls. He nodded his head with a sense of satisfaction. It had seemed like an overwhelming task, an impossible task, when he began, but that just proved that if you stayed with something day after day, you would eventually accomplish your goal.

Urquhart had definitely accomplished his goal this time. After ten days of nonstop caulking, the leaks had stopped. The real test of Urquhart’s skill would come when the new molasses was pumped into the tank’s well—but he was sure the lap joints would hold.

Arthur P. Jell squirmed in his chair after the upsetting telephone conversation with the Boston Police. The new year was not beginning the way he had hoped. He had thought that the end of the war would bring about an end to violent anarchist activity in Boston, but apparently that was not the case. A Boston police officer had discovered a number of placards tacked onto Commercial Street buildings threatening violence, and the police department was contacting North End business owners to alert them. The officer told Jell that the placard apparently was in response to Congressional action two months ago that toughened the existing Immigration Act by making it easier to deport anarchists. That triggered the issuance of a deportation warrant for Luigi Galleani, leader of the Italian anarchists in Boston, and eight of his closest associates. They were regarded by the Bureau of Immigration as being “among the most dangerous aliens yet found within this country.” The police officer told Jell that legal maneuvering had delayed Galleani’s deportation and he had remained free.

The notices were entitled “GO-HEAD” and condemned the “senile fossils ruling the United States” for passing a deportation law affecting all foreign radicals. Jell had written down the exact text as the officer read the message: “Do not think that only foreigners are anarchists. We are a great number right here at home. Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores. The storm is within and very soon will leap and crush and annihilate you in blood and fire. You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you.”

The notice bore the signature, “The American Anarchists,” but police said the circular was the unmistakable work of Galleani’s followers; their mentor was the prime target of the new deportation law. Witnesses told police that they saw an old man and a boy distributing the notices. Police assured Jell that they tore down the signs quickly.

Jell took this threat seriously. Although the war had ended, the Commercial Street molasses tank still represented a symbol of war and Big Business to the anarchists; the newspapers were full of stories about the enormous profits realized by the munitions industry and the companies that supported it during the past four years. The bomb that had been discovered at USIA’s Brooklyn plant in 1916, undoubtedly planted by foreign anarchists living nearby, was still fresh in Jell’s mind, as was the telephone threat that Gonzales had reported last year. Jell had been skeptical at the time, had doubted that any call had taken place, and believed the whole incident was a figment of Gonzales’s twisted imagination. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if Gonzales was telling the truth, as the discovery of these most recent anarchist posters indicated? Jell was awaiting the arrival of a molasses steamer from the Caribbean in just a few days. Any disruption at the tank could prove disastrous to his plan to outrun Prohibition by producing alcohol as rapidly as possible at the East Cambridge distillery.

All of these were good arguments to rehire the private security guards at the tank that Jell had dispensed with after the armistice.

Still, Jell had to balance the anarchists’ threats against the cost of hiring full-time private security guards. The molasses distilling business had taken a downturn since munitions demand had plummeted late in the summer of 1918. Until production ramped up again and USIA realized revenue from the sale of alcohol to liquor distributors, Jell had to hold the line on costs. And his superintendent, William White, worked at the tank site for most of the business day and could watch for suspicious characters lurking about the area.

No, Jell decided he would not rehire a full-time private security force. Now that the police were aware of this latest threat—they had made
him
aware of it, after all—he was sure they could provide adequate security on the waterfront. The warning from the police department about the anarchist placards was unnerving, but it wasn’t enough to panic him into boosting his expenses.

“The tank will be safe,” Jell said aloud, sitting alone in his office. “The ship arrives next week. We’ll be ready to go.”

The day dawned bittersweet for Hugh Ogden. As of the first of the year, he had been relieved from further duty with his beloved 42nd Division, and assigned permanently to the Office of Civil Affairs at the headquarters of the 3rd Army of Occupation. Today was the day he would leave France and the brave men of the 42nd, and travel to Coblenz, Germany to advise officials on procedures as the Germans attempted to set up a civilian government. He had just finished writing to his friend, Lippincott, at the University of Pennsylvania, about his reassignment, suggesting “it might be of interest to some of my friends among the alumni.” Ogden looked forward to his new assignment and was thankful that the war had ended. But he would miss France and miss the Rainbow Division,
his
division, a band of men that he felt epitomized the definition of courage under fire.

France had been the scene of much bloodshed and horror during this terrible war, but for Ogden, it had also been the place where the troops of the 42nd had fought with valor and honor, not because they liked to fight or wanted to die, but because they sought peace. Ogden believed that some men were willing to sacrifice their own lives in war so that many more could live, and the Rainbow Division was made up of such men. He believed those men exemplified the importance of a strong standing army. Military strength not only could win a war, but could prevent future wars. “There are those who visualize the horrors of war and probably believe that the way to abolish war in general is to abolish the army,” he would write years later, after his return to Boston. “Inadequacy or lack of military strength has never yet prevented a nation from going to war. It never will. We must profit by the lessons of the Great War by insisting upon an adequate degree of military and naval preparedness.”

Hugh Ogden had learned a great deal about men in this war. He learned that a man would scream when shrapnel tore his flesh—and scream louder when swarming trench rats did the same, as he lay wounded and helpless, his buddies unable to get to him before the hungry rodents ripped him apart. The rats, millions of them, many as big as cats, had feasted on food scraps and dead bodies in hundreds of miles of trenches across France and Belgium. Toward the end of the war, they had become emboldened enough to also attack those wounded men who were too weak to fend them off.

Ogden also learned that even the strongest man would sit down on the battlefield and weep, or try to gouge his own eyes out, or simply go mad with terror when the incessant pounding of artillery fire first shattered his eardrums and then his sanity. The shell-shock cases were the worst to see, strong men breaking down, shaking with terror, babbling incoherently, facing torment for months or years or forever.

He had learned about heroes, too, good men who had put themselves in harm’s way to save their comrades. The Rainbow’s poet, Joyce Kilmer, was one of these. Sergeant Kilmer was leading a few other soldiers into a wooded area in search of enemy machine guns, when he was killed on July 30, 1918, his dream of writing a major book about the war dying with him. His men buried him at the edge of a little copse known as the Wood of the Burned Bridge in France, a peaceful spot fit for a soldier-poet.

Ogden knew of other brave men. One had hurled himself onto a live grenade that had been thrown into a trench among five soldiers; he was killed, but the other men survived. Another had single-handedly charged an enemy machine gun nest to clear the way for his unit’s advance; he took out the nest but shortly thereafter he bled to death, his upper leg cut to ribbons by the merciless rapid fire. Two more men had risked running across an open, muddy field carrying a stretcher, under blistering enemy fire, to rescue a wounded buddy. Though further hampered on their return by the weight of the wounded man and the thick mud sucking at their boots the whole way across the field, they managed to somehow avoid the gunfire and reach the safety of the trench.

Gen. John J. “Blackjack” Pershing and Col. Douglas MacArthur were the renowned members of the Rainbow Division, but Ogden knew that it was the everyday infantrymen, the Doughboys, who were the heart and soul of the 42nd.

Ogden did not often become friendly with these soldiers—his position as judge advocate would not allow it—but he admired their bravery and grit and mettle in the face of death, pain, suffering, disease, and cold. War had provided Ogden with an opportunity to observe men laboring under extraordinary hardships, something he had never seen before. As one of Boston’s most prominent corporate attorneys, the battles he fought had been confined to boardrooms and courtrooms and the exclusive Harvard Club—rarefied circles and dignified places where men of refinement and good breeding talked in hushed tones and negotiated reasonable compromises, then retired to side rooms to drink brandy from snifters and smoke expensive cigars. At the very worst, a bad decision could cost these men money, but never their lives. He once considered the stakes to be high in these corporate dealings, until he had traveled to the killing fields of France and watched the Rainbow Division in action.

Then he had learned what high stakes were all about.

This lesson had helped Hugh Ogden reach a decision. He expected to be in Germany for a few months, and then would return to Washington, D.C., to review Army court martial procedures. He was likely to be discharged in the summer of 1919. After that, he would return to Boston, but not to his old law firm. He needed a change, a new start where he could apply the lessons he had learned from the 42nd, of sacrifice, of helping others, of committing to a cause greater than oneself.

The only way to do that was to establish his own law practice. He would work alone and make his own decisions. He would still specialize in corporate work, but when an individual came to him, a man who was not wealthy but needed legal help nonetheless, perhaps even a former member of the Rainbow regiment, Hugh Ogden could take the case without concerning himself with the firm’s reputation or standing in the Boston power structure. There would be a monetary price to pay, at least initially, but money was not an important factor at this point in his career.

What was important was for him to make a small difference when he returned stateside, to dedicate his civilian life to accomplishments that symbolically exemplified the
major
difference the men of the 42nd had made in the trenches and on the battlefields of Europe. “They will not sleep in Flanders Fields unless we pick up the torch they bore so high and carry on in the great cause for which they had died,” he would declare in a speech several years later. “We have to make safe the cause of liberty by living for it—perhaps, indeed, a harder task than theirs who died for it. They did not give their lives so the great might have further privilege to oppress the small, so that the rich might abuse the poor, and that discontent and envy, hatred and malice might thrive unchecked in our body politic.” Ogden had learned that Americans had the duty to help others when they needed help, and sacrifice for the greater good when called upon, as their troops had done when called upon in Europe. “The privilege of self-sacrifice is as great and the need is greater than it was in 1917,” he would conclude in the same speech years later.

Now, in January 1919, preparing to travel to Germany to join the Occupation Army, Hugh Ogden believed he had drawn enough inspiration in the heroic actions of the Rainbow Division to seek a higher legal calling when he returned to civilian life. He was more determined than ever that the law would work for all people; men or women, wealthy or poor, Brahmin or immigrant. He would do what he could to uphold the principles that drove him to become a lawyer in the first place—careful deliberation, wise counsel, unwavering honesty, and a devotion to the truth.

He could not predict exactly how this new commitment would affect his future. He just knew it would.

It was bitter cold as Frank Van Gelder brought the
Miliero
into port just after 11
A.M.
on Sunday, January 12. Sunbeams reflected silvery off the choppy gray-black water, producing brilliant light but generating little heat. The temperature was in the teens, and a stiff wind whistled across Boston’s inner harbor, rattling the pilings that supported the long walking pier that extended from the wharf. According to weather reports, the mercury would drop to 2 degrees Fahrenheit by nightfall.