Dark Tide (33 page)

Choate scored a courtroom coup by convincing the fifty-nine-year-old Wedger, an eleven-year veteran of the State Police Department of Public Safety, to testify for USIA. Wedger had broad and lengthy experience in dealing with explosives, and his reputation was impeccable. He had responsibility for enforcing all state regulations governing the handling of explosives and inflammable material, including the inspection of buildings where they were stored. He was also the first person called to the scene to investigate explosions, fires of suspicious origin, and illegal explosives of “any kind found anywhere, all over the state.” Prior to his work with the state, he had served as superintendent and chemist for a fireworks manufacturing company. Wedger had been trained at MIT, but most of his working knowledge had been passed on by his father, who was a distinguished chemist and pyrotechnist killed in an explosion in 1895. “For more than forty years, I have studied explosives and inflammables,” Wedger said.

Now this longtime explosives expert, an eminent state police chemist, perhaps
the
most knowledgeable person in Massachusetts on the effects of dynamite, TNT, and nitroglycerine, stated under oath what USIA needed Ogden to hear. Wedger, who had initially stated publicly, and under oath at Judge Bolster’s 1919 inquest, that there was no evidence of any explosion on Commercial Street, reversed that opinion when Charles Choate put him on the stand:

Choate:
State again what your opinion is as to the cause that produced the accident.

Wedger:
I should say it was caused by an explosion.

Choate:
And what kind of explosive?

Wedger:
It might be most any kind of high explosive—dynamite or nitroglycerine.

Choate:
Suppose a person had taken dynamite in some sort of a container to the top of that tank, with the fuse wound around the container, and lighted it with his pipe, or cigarette, or cigar, and dropped it through the manhole at the top, so that the burning end of the fuse had immediately gone under the molasses, would that [molasses] have put out the fuse?

Wedger:
No, sir.

Choate:
How much dynamite or nitroglycerine would be required [to destroy the tank]?

Wedger:
Anywhere from five to fifteen pounds; twelve or fifteen pounds.

Choate:
How large a package, or container, would be required to hold that amount?

Wedger:
Ten pounds would require a pipe three inches in diameter, about two-and-a-half feet long.

Choate had drawn first blood. He had succeeded in eliciting sworn testimony from a distinguished and disinterested law enforcement expert, an unpaid witness, one whose word was above reproach, that the Commercial Street molasses disaster had been no accident.

But USIA’s advantage didn’t last long. Under cross-examination, Damon Hall filleted Walter Wedger, using against him his own inquest testimony, and reducing the cool, experienced state police chemist to a near-incoherent state, a man who at best appeared befuddled and a parser of words, and at worst, came across in court as an outright liar.

First, Hall asked Wedger to describe a “common explosion scene” and then took him through the day of the disaster, when the chemist visited the scene about an hour after the tank collapsed. At any explosion, Wedger said, the concussive force of the blast shatters windows and glass “for many hundreds of feet” from the actual bomb; broken glass, Wedger said, “is one of the almost inseparable evidences” of a dynamite or nitroglycerine explosion.

Hall:
So, given that, did you find any of the common evidences of a dynamite explosion [at the molasses scene]?

Wedger:
I did not.

Hall:
Nowhere on that day were you able to find that cardinal evidence [broken glass] of a dynamite or high explosive explosion [sic], were you?

Wedger:
I did not find it.

Hall:
Did you see any effect that day, such as you would expect to find where a high explosive has been used?

Wedger:
No, sir.

Hall:
Did you see any evidence in any of the parts [of the tank wall] that were collected … from which you could make up your mind that dynamite or any other high explosives had caused the failure?

Wedger:
Did not, no sir.

Next, Hall reminded Wedger that he had collected a sample of both the “old” molasses that had been stored in the tank and the “new” molasses that the
Miliero
had pumped in days before the explosion. Since the new, warmer molasses had been pumped into the tank from the bottom, it pushed up against the colder molasses already in the tank. Wedger had conducted his test in a similar way. Hall quoted Wedger from his 1919 testimony during the inquest: “I took some of the molasses to the State laboratory and gave it a test to see just about what it contained and its purity, and inside of an hour after it reached there, I noticed bubbles coming from the top of it, fermentation taking place … I then connected up a quart bottle of molasses to a pressure gauge, and in twenty-four hours, I got a pressure of half a pound; in forty-eight hours, I got a pressure of a full pound.”

Fermentation is the process by which sugar, or molasses, is converted to alcohol by microscopic yeasts that thrive in the absence of oxygen, a process used commercially to produce wine. Wedger acknowledged that, as the yeasts grew in number inside the tank, they would also produce carbon dioxide gas as a by-product of the fermenting process. The pressure from the gas would seek a release of some sort.

Hall:
Did you testify under oath at the inquest that the upper layers (of molasses) would effectively act as tamping agents, and pressure [inside the tank] running into very high figures would develop?

Wedger:
I don’t remember that I said or made any such statement.

Hall:
You do not? Did you say that the upper mass of molasses was so leathery [because it was cold] that in your opinion it was an effective tamping which prevented the escape of the gas?

Wedger:
It would act more or less as a tamping owing to its higher viscosity, but it would not prevent the escape of gas through it.

Hall:
Wouldn’t it? Let me read what you said under oath about the matter: “That gas has to go somewhere. It tries to get up through these several feet of leathery substance and it takes a long time for it to get up through there, and at the same time it exerts a certain fermenting pressure.” Do you remember that testimony?

Wedger:
Yes it seems to me that I do.

Hall:
Then owing to the cold weather, in your opinion, that mass of molasses was so leathery that it would hold back the escape of the gas and cause a fermenting pressure on the
sides
of the tank?

Wedger:
There would be some amount of pressure on the sides of the tank … but it would not fully prevent its ultimate escape [through the molasses] … a certain amount of pressure on the sides of the tank, yes. I don’t know how that could be figured.

Hall:
Do you remember saying to the grand jury that if the tank had the proper factor of safety that any pressure which might be exerted against the sides by this gas in the process of fermentation, that there would not be “
any
chance for the thing to give way?”

Wedger:
I do remember that that was the way I felt about it.

Hall had succeeded in getting Wedger to admit two critical points under oath. The fact that the state police chemist had discovered no broken glass at the Commercial Street scene (beyond the windows that had been smashed by the molasses wave itself), meant that the customary “cardinal evidence” of a concussive explosion was lacking. Second, because the cold molasses most likely blocked or trapped the carbon dioxide gas fermenting below (between the warm and cold layers of molasses), the gas would almost certainly exert pressure against the sides of the tank looking for escape.

Having elicited those concessions from a key defense witness, Hall dispatched of Wedger with a flourish:

Hall:
Did you
ever
, until your testimony this morning, express to anybody—Judge Bolster, your superior, the State Police or anybody else—that the cause of the Commercial Street tank collapse was dynamite, or some other high explosive of that nature?

Wedger:
I had not fully formed my opinion until he [Charles Choate] asked the question.

Hall:
This morning, then, for the first time in your life, you either formed or expressed the opinion that dynamite was the cause of this disaster.

Wedger:
I had thought it over.

Hall:
But you formed or expressed it for the first time this morning?

Wedger:
It is the first time I have been asked for an opinion.

Hall:
And the first time you have ever formed the opinion?

Wedger:
Well, I couldn’t form one until he told me what to form it on.

Hall:
I see. Well then, your answer, sir, is based upon his [Choate’s]
hypothesis
only?

Wedger:
Why, absolutely so.

Wedger’s woeful performance was magnified by the fact that Charles Choate and USIA were relying almost entirely on expert witnesses to prove their case—and Wedger was the only one of these who was not being paid by the company. Choate was not calling a single representative of USIA to vouch for the tank’s sturdiness, or to justify the decision to build the tank in the North End neighborhood.

In addition, Choate had called, and would call, just one eyewitness. Her name was Winnifred McNamara, a widow who lived at 548 Commercial Street, across the street from where the tank had stood. Her demeanor and testimony appeared to do as much to hurt the defense as help it. McNamara said she was hanging laundry on the roof of her home just after 12:30
P.M.
on the day the tank collapsed. Just before she saw the roof “push away” from the tank, McNamara testified that she had seen smoke rising from the vicinity of the tank. “I saw smoke rising, and then the whole top slid off … just as a dish on a table would slide off, and then the molasses walked up, just walked up, and you know the froth and the smoke, like, walked up to the top, but I didn’t see the sides going out … I heard a sound like this: r-r-r-r-r-r, a kind of heavy sound. In a few minutes I was lifted from the corner over to that corner, and I was hit on the side, and I pitched back on the broad of my back, and after that I couldn’t tell no more.”

But under cross-examination, McNamara became agitated when Hall pressed her to identify from where the smoke billowed and what type of pipe protruded from the top of the tank. Three times, McNamara threw her hands into the air, left the witness chair and threatened to do “some damage” if she were compelled to testify further. Nonetheless, she complied immediately when Ogden ordered her to sit back down. Hall continued: “Was it a straight pipe or a crooked pipe” he asked. McNamara replied: “No, sir, I couldn’t say. I didn’t see the pipe, I saw smoke … I couldn’t tell you what was on the top of the tank, sir.”

Hall would later ask the court rhetorically—with factories operating on the waterfront, ships moored at the docks, and tugboats chugging through the harbor—“do you think it was possible for anybody to look over the [Charles] river and toward the [Charlestown] Navy Yard at that time of day and
not
see whiffs of smoke and steam?” How, Hall wondered, did such smoke prove the presence of a bomb?

Hall’s colleague, Endicott P. Saltonstall, then addressed McNamara about the presence of an anarchist. “Did you notice anything else about the roof at the time you first saw the smoke … did you see any man, woman, or child on the roof?” he asked. McNamara replied: “No, sir, I did not. No, I did not, sir. I didn’t see any man on the roof of the tank at all, sir. No, I did not, sir.”

Hall would later say that by selecting McNamara as its only eyewitness, USIA was building its defense around the “testimony of a woman, who, if not insane, certainly showed evidence in the courtroom of being temperamental … as I have read and considered her testimony, I have been driven to think of that other famous woman in Chicago, whose cow is said to have kicked over the lantern. I think, to use the street slang, that those legends both concern plain bull, and not cow.”

The inconsistencies in Wedger’s testimony, coupled with McNamara’s tentativeness and bizarre courtroom behavior, provided Hall with an opening through which to strike at the heart of the defense. But he still had to battle the tenor of the times and the plausibility of USIA’s anarchist argument. To fully discredit the theory of a mysterious bomber, Hall had to show that the tank was unsafe from the beginning, that its collapse of January 15, 1919, and the subsequent destruction that resulted, were inevitable, given the manner in which the receptacle was constructed and the area in which it was located.

He would build his case throughout the late fall of 1920 and the early winter of 1921, first with the testimony of a Boston Building Department employee, then with a steady procession of witnesses who could describe the condition of the tank from the time it was built until the moment it collapsed. Some of them were plaintiffs, like firefighter Bill Connor and stonecutter John Barry, and Hall would also question former USIA employee Isaac Gonzales, in great detail. But most of Hall’s witnesses would be clerks and city workers and stevedores, disinterested parties with nothing to gain by testifying against a large national company.

Once these witnesses helped him establish the overall condition of the tank, Hall would train his sights on less cooperative prey. He would seek to cull incriminating testimony from the USIA employee who had the most intimate knowledge of the Commercial Street molasses tank.

His name was Arthur P. Jell.