Dark Tide (38 page)

During the two years of testimony, the world carried on. Congress officially ended World War I with a joint resolution in July, and in October agreed to separate treaties with Germany, Austria, and Hungary—its final acts in the utter rejection of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. Both the American economy and the national standard of living continued to grow. President Harding’s Interior Secretary Albert Fall was accused of selling for personal gain the nation’s oil reserves at Wyoming’s Teapot Dome; the resulting scandal would paralyze Harding’s administration and render the president all but impotent until his death in office on August 2, 1923, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Among the players in the molasses case, plaintiffs’ attorney Endicott P. Saltonstall died in December 1922, shortly after the governor had appointed him district attorney for Middlesex County. “He spent his life largely in trying the general litigation which comes before the Superior Court,” said one eulogizer, “but he also knew … the duty of an advocate to come to the relief of those in difficulty and distress.”

In May 1922, Hugh Ogden, always the soldier, delivered the Memorial Day keynote speech to the residents of Meredith, New Hampshire, posing the question: “What lesson is there for us in the impressive ceremonies of this day?” It was here that he talked about the need for the government to help each citizen “receive his full inheritance.”

In July 1923, Ogden begged the indulgence of lawyers from both sides, informing them that he would be taking a week off to attend a reunion of the 42nd Rainbow Division in Indianapolis. “If you will make some arrangement that will let me go the week of July 12, I would like it very much,” he said humbly.

Finally, in mid-July 1923, three years after it had begun, the testimony ended. For Hugh Ogden, what had begun as a “six week” commitment had lasted longer than his service in the Great War; indeed, longer than America’s involvement in the European struggle.

In three years, Ogden twice had inspected the waterfront premises where the tank stood, had listened to 920 witnesses whose testimony covered more than twenty thousand pages, and had examined 1,584 exhibits.

It wasn’t over yet. For the next eleven weeks, Ogden would hear closing arguments, both on the liability and damages portions of the cases. The lawyers would be as garrulous as ever; their closing statements would cover another 4,600 pages of court transcripts.

After that, the talking would cease and Hugh Ogden could finally render his decision.

Two weeks after closing arguments began in the molasses trial, Vice President and former Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge was formally administered the oath of office by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, himself a former president. Coolidge, born on the most American of holidays, July 4, was fifty-one-years-old. He initially had been sworn in as the nation’s thirtieth president by his father, a notary public, on the night Warren Harding died.

Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts in 1919 when the molasses tank collapsed.

Now he was the third president to serve during the extraordinary court case that had followed.

TWELVE

If Charles Choate could have chosen the time to deliver a closing argument in defense of the virtues of a large American industrial corporation, he would have been hard-pressed to select a more opportune month than September 1923. The economy was expanding, production had reached new heights, Americans had money to spend, and Big Business, unencumbered by the government interference of the war years, was the roaring engine that was powering the prosperity.

September in Boston exemplified the economic optimism and confidence that was sweeping the country. More than a million people had traveled through the city over the Labor Day holiday, breaking all records. The travelers were lured by promising weather and improved business conditions, according to the
Boston Herald
. Railroads and steamships, their terminals jammed, “reached the limits of their resources and have thrown up their hands while hoping for the best” in their efforts to accommodate the vacationing public. Highways to the north, west, and south of Boston were filled, “miles distant … with a boiling current of motor cars … for 20 miles or more on most of the trunk roads, the greatest possible speed was a sluggish five miles an hour.”

Labor Day travel had been September’s first positive economic signpost in Massachusetts. Many others followed.

Textile mill owners predicted that their factories would be operating at full capacity for the fall months, which would mean full employment as well.

More than ten thousand people witnessed the opening of a new commercial airport in East Boston on September 8 that would transform Boston into an international aviation and economic center (and would one day be named for another prominent Boston judge-soldier, Lt. Gen. Edward Lawrence Logan).

Employees of the Boston Edison Electric Illuminating Company celebrated the company’s generation of a connected load of five hundred thousand kilowatts, enough power to light one hundred thousand homes or a continuous line of lamps set eighteen inches apart on both sides of a roadway from Boston to San Francisco.

And on September 18, just two days before Choate delivered his closing statement, the National Motor and Accessory Manufacturers Association Convention opened in Boston, with organizers predicting that nearly 4 million cars and trucks would be produced and sold in 1923, making it the “greatest year in the automotive industry’s history.” One Studebaker executive crowed: “The automobile is so interwoven into our national life that the production and sale of motor cars is a fixed and stable business that nothing can undermine.”

Textile companies. Electric companies. Aviation companies. Automotive companies. Charles Choate knew that these were reputable, established, rock-solid organizations that were responsible for America’s economic expansion and higher standard of living.

United States Industrial Alcohol was in the same class—a major employer, a leader in its industry, a national company with many smaller suppliers who depended on its success. To single USIA out, to find it liable for the molasses disaster and force it to pay exorbitant damages in this lawsuit, would be a step backward, a return to excessive government regulations and restrictions that contributed to the economic stagnation immediately following the war.

Again, Choate hoped Auditor Hugh Ogden would see it the same way.

“What is more plausible?” boomed Choate as he rose to begin his closing remarks. “Did this tank collapse because of structural weakness, or did it collapse because of an agency set in motion by some unknown third person who had access to it? This is where we come to; that is where we are at grips.” Choate suggested to Hugh Ogden that the choice was obvious, so long as Ogden could overcome his “reluctance to find that a thing was destroyed by dynamite in a civilized place like the City of Boston.”

Choate briefly countered the plaintiffs’ claim that the tank was improperly designed and constructed to withstand the weight and pressure of 2.3 million gallons of molasses. “The tank was built by experienced tank builders,” he said. “They had built thousands of them … the tank size presented no unusual problems to the Hammond Iron Works … it was designed by them with an experience of years and successful construction and maintenance behind them. There was no use of defective or improper material. There was no employment of unskilled or inexperienced men in the construction of this tank. It was a good workmanlike job, done by experienced, workmanlike people, out of first-class material.”

Beyond that, Choate argued, January 15, 1919, was “an ordinary winter day, without extreme wind or other extremes for our climate that all buildings did not withstand without the slightest consequence.” In addition, he pointed out that the tank had been “filled to capacity about a dozen times” before the accident happened [actually, seven times]. “If it did not have sufficient structural strength to withstand a load of molasses which was in it at the time of the disaster, it would have failed the first time that it was filled with a similar load.”

No, Choate said, a review of the evidence, circumstantial as it was, could lead only to the conclusion that dynamite destroyed the tank. Nor should the fact that the evidence was only circumstantial weaken the defendant’s case. “You haven’t got any evidence to the effect that a man went there and placed dynamite there,” Choate conceded, “but there are as many human eyes that saw a man place dynamite there, as human eyes saw the metal stretch and these pieces gradually give way.”

What was important for Ogden to consider, Choate argued, was the radical climate in Boston and the country at the time, the analysis USIA’s expert witnesses provided, the results of their experiments with the replica tank, and the testimony of Winnifred McNamara, the “closest eyewitness to the tank,” who saw a puff of white smoke near the manhole on the tank’s roof just before it collapsed.

“This tank was in a section of the city which the authorities had recognized required special guard during the existence of war time conditions,” Choate pointed out, in “danger of destruction from persons with perverted minds …”

Choate recounted the anarchist activity in Boston and emphasized that USIA’s role in the manufacture of munitions would have fueled the ire of violent anarchists operating in the North End. He reminded Ogden of the North End Police Station bombing. He stressed that a bomb had been discovered and disarmed at USIA’s Brooklyn plant
before
the Boston disaster, and that an “incendiary fire” had destroyed the Brooklyn facility not long afterward. He said that the company had lost two steamships at sea, “with no explanation … all we know is that one apparently broke in two and went to the bottom. The other one disappeared; nobody ever knew what became of it, and nobody ever heard of a living soul upon it.

“Then there is the evidence of the man who was there [Isaac Gonzales], of the telephone threat, where he was called up on the telephone and told that somebody was going to destroy the plant,” Choate said. “Evidently, somebody in the community, for some reason, wanted to destroy property used in this way … The threats against this property, the printed threats posted, threatening all property in that section of the city, present a most unusual background when you come to study the occurrence of a catastrophe like this.”