Dark Tide (29 page)

With the Boston Police and steel strikes dominating headlines across the country, President Wilson continued stumping for the League of Nations in the western United States, even as he communicated with his cabinet about the worsening labor situation. The stress of trying to accomplish both tasks proved too much. After thirty-seven major speeches in twenty-two days, he was suffering from severe headaches. At 2
A.M.
, on the night of September 25, he was found sitting motionless in the drawing room compartment of his private railway carriage outside of Pueblo, Colorado, “ashen and drooling slightly from the left side of his mouth.”

The president had suffered a nervous collapse from sheer exhaustion. He canceled the remainder of his speaking tour and his train sped back to Washington, where his physician ordered “absolute rest.”

On October 2, Wilson suffered a massive stroke from which he would never fully recover, and was incapacitated for the next seven months. His illness would be the beginning of the end of America’s involvement in the League of Nations, which the Senate would ultimately reject, and delay America’s further participation in world politics. Undoubtedly, it was also the end of Wilson’s plans to run for a third term, leading to an overwhelming victory for Republican Warren G. Harding in the 1920 election.

One other incident occurred in September 1919 that received little notice in the press, its overall impact dwarfed by events that were tearing at the country’s fabric.

On the night of September 14 and the morning of September 15, fire roared through United States Industrial Alcohol’s Brooklyn manufacturing plant. No one was injured, but the processing facility, where molasses was distilled into alcohol, was destroyed. Flames also consumed the five steel molasses storage tanks on the site, badly charring the outside walls. Though the tanks’ rivets held strong and molasses did not escape, USIA’s factory was so badly damaged that the company shut down its Brooklyn operations.

Millard Fillmore Cook, Jr., the superintendent of the plant since 1912, the man in charge when police found a bomb on the premises in June 1916, was transferred to supervise USIA’s plant in Peoria, Illinois.

USIA’s internal investigation later showed that the fire was set by someone using an “incendiary device.” It was clear evidence, the company claimed, that anarchists had attacked USIA yet again in 1919, a pattern that had begun with the destruction of the Boston molasses tank in January.

Police never apprehended anyone for the Brooklyn fire.

On December 1, USIA shut down its manufacturing facility in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, nearly four years after the Commercial Street tank was built and eleven months after the molasses catastrophe changed everything.

The company fired nearly all of the 125 people who worked at the plant.

Arthur P. Jell was transferred to New York City headquarters, where he became assistant treasurer and vice president of USIA.

Stephen Clougherty died in the late morning at the Boston State Hospital for the insane in Mattapan, a troubled and frightened man who finally surrendered to the demons that had tortured him every day since rescuers pulled him from the molasses.

His brother, Martin, thought Stephen’s death was a blessing. Martin had visited Stephen twice a week for most of his confinement in the asylum, and every day since the thirty-two-year-old retarded man had been placed on the danger list. Each time Martin visited, he found that Stephen had deteriorated both physically and mentally. Stephen had started out nervous, agitated, and prone to hallucinations. Then he contracted tuberculosis, which doctors attributed to his overall weakened condition. It appeared that Stephen had neither the strength nor the will to fight off the disease.

From that point, Martin witnessed his brother’s rapid decline with anger and sadness. Stephen was a man in age and physical appearance only; he had been no more than a boy, really. He had been a good-natured sort, friendly, smiling, almost docile, willing to do simple chores and taking life as it came day by day. But the molasses had killed him, as sure as if it had smothered him on January 15. Martin found himself again enraged by the disaster, but whose fault was the tank’s collapse? Who was responsible for killing his mother, and now, his brother? He had had such big plans for them, and for himself, plans to leave the city, to move out from under the shadow of the overhead rail tracks, and into a clean and quiet suburban neighborhood. Now those dreams were shattered.

Near the end, his brother, Stephen, alternated between quiet sobs and utter silence, a husk of a man, catatonic much of the time. He died without making a sound.

His was the twenty-first and final death attributed to the Boston molasses flood.

Four days before Christmas, at 5
A.M.
, the
Buford
set sail from New York harbor for Russia, carrying 249 deportees, including renowned anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. J. Edgar Hoover, who was a special assistant to Attorney General Palmer, watched the ship pull away. Hoover had strongly advocated the Goldman and Berkman deportations, branding them as “beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country.” The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
echoed the feelings of the vast majority of the general public: “It is to be hoped and expected that other vessels, larger, more commodious, carrying similar cargoes, will follow in her wake.” With the deportations of Luigi Galleani in June, and now Goldman and Berkman, the Justice Department had succeeded in expelling three of the most influential anarchists from the United States during 1919.

The year’s economic deterioration, unprecedented labor union militancy, and increasingly daring and violent anarchist attacks rocked postwar America, sowed fear across the land, and fueled hatred toward so-called Bolshevist agitators and foreigners, whom many Americans blamed for the mayhem and chaos.

United States Industrial Alcohol would rely on these twin emotions of fear and hatred as the foundation of its defense when one of the largest civil lawsuits in the nation’s history began in 1920. The suit would finally determine who was to blame for the Boston molasses flood, a tragedy that had killed twenty-one people, injured 150 others, destroyed property, and foretold a year of turbulence and disruption.

USIA had escaped criminal prosecution when the grand jury declined to indict any of its executives for manslaughter.

But the victims and their families still demanded justice.

PART III
David vs. Goliath

Colonel Hugh W. Ogden, Boston’s “soldier-lawyer,” ruled against United States Industrial Alcohol, finding the company liable for the molasses disaster.

(From the Collections of the University of Pennsylvania Archives)

TEN

It was midafternoon of the hottest day of the year, and waves of heat shimmied like dancing specters off Boston’s baked downtown streets. Sweating beneath his stiff, high collar, Hugh W. Ogden toiled in his 75 Federal Street office, high above the city, putting his business affairs in order. Through the open window, Ogden saw veins of lightning crackle across a purple-black sky to the north, heard the low rumble of summer thunder miles away, and smelled fresh rain mixed with sea salt on the warm wind that blew in from the harbor.

For the last three days, the weather pattern had been the same. Sweltering mornings and early afternoons, then violent thunderstorms lashing the streets when the heat of the day reached its apex around 3
P.M.
Yesterday, hailstones had damaged crops in communities far north of Boston, and lightning set ablaze several wood-frame buildings in nearby suburbs like Lynn and Somerville. Ten people had collapsed from the heat. One sea captain who had piloted a steamer from Costa Rica declared that Boston was hotter than the tropics.

Ogden was hoping for a break in the temperature tomorrow. He would begin presiding over hearings in the molasses flood case at Suffolk County Court House in downtown Boston, and the old building held the heat like a cauldron. Superior Court Judge Loranus Eaton Hitchcock had asked Ogden to serve as an “auditor,” an impartial master who would hear evidence on liability, and possible damages, and issue a report on his findings. Depending on the nature of his report, the case could then move on to a full civil trial in front of a jury.

The court believed that, due to the complexity of the case, and the number of plaintiffs and potential witnesses, justice would be better served if a tough, fair-minded legal expert could first whittle down the essence of the arguments and find the nub of truth—or at least make it less cumbersome for a jury to arrive at its
own
truth. Ogden had agreed to serve as auditor, for a nominal stipend, after Judge Hitchcock had assured him that he would only need to carve out about six weeks from his schedule to fulfill the responsibility. Today, he would finish organizing his affairs for the next month and a half and referring his regular caseload to colleagues he respected.