Dark Tide (41 page)

But Ogden had a deeper set of beliefs, and they were grounded in a sense of fairness and justice. They had been formed early in his life, through the influence of his minister father and Ogden’s own interest in religion, and then strengthened by his years of military service and his love for the law. His religious training taught him to treat men with decency and dignity, regardless of their backgrounds or social standing. His years as an Army judge advocate, and a civilian attorney, taught him that adherence to the evidence was the only fair way to review and decide a case.

In the molasses case, the evidence was clear, and Ogden ruled the only way he could have. Though he never publicly stated his personal opinion on USIA’s defense strategy, he almost certainly would have been insulted that it was built entirely on speculation and innuendo, and perhaps worse, that it attempted to appeal to his perceived cultural and personal biases. Hugh Ogden was a bigger man than that. He had entered private law practice after his service in the World War determined to contribute to society, to make a difference, to help people. By basing his decision in the molasses case on the evidence alone, by refusing to be cowed or swayed by Charles Choate’s specious defense, by seeking and finding the truth, he had succeeded.

After finding against USIA on liability, Ogden turned to the damages portion of the case—the amount each victim or family of the deceased would receive. Again, these were advisory in nature and would set the stage for a jury trial, unless the two sides agreed to settle once they heard Ogden’s recommendations.

Ogden recommended an estimated $300,000 in total damages, equivalent to about $30 million today, still a relatively small sum considering the harshness of his report on USIA’s negligence. The small amount was most likely based on the low-income wage-earning status of most of the victims. The figure included an average of $6,000 to the estates of those who were killed, more than $25,000 to the City of Boston for the buildings in the North End Paving Yard, and another $42,000 to the Boston Elevated Railway Company, mainly for the damage caused to its overhead trestle and track bed.

There was an emotional aspect to Ogden’s damage awards; the auditor was put in a position of determining who “suffered” more in the disaster. Because their loved ones were killed instantly, for example, the families of Maria Distasio, Pasquale Iantosca, and Bridget Clougherty received $6,000 in damages (the Distasios received another $2,500 for the fractured skull suffered by Maria’s brother, Antonio, who survived). Firefighter George Layhe’s beneficiaries received $7,000, with the extra $1,000 for the pain and suffering he endured during his hours trapped under the firehouse, before he smothered when he was no longer able to hold his head up above the molasses.

The family of James McMullen, the Bay State Railway foreman who was scolding Maria Distasio the moment before the tank’s collapse, received $7,500, including $1,500 for pain and suffering. “He suffered with infection and delirium until the Sunday [after the flood],” Ogden noted. Relatives of Flaminio Gallerani, whose body was found under the pier eleven days after the accident, were awarded $6,300. “[His] fright and terror and mental revulsion against impending death, I find to be very great,” Ogden said.

For those who survived, Ogden also had to determine “degrees of suffering,” from property damage and minor injuries to permanent afflictions and conditions. To the family of a four-year-old girl who had been knocked down by the wave in her home and cracked her two front teeth, Ogden awarded $400, noting they were the girl’s “first teeth.”

Others received more. Martin and Teresa Clougherty were awarded $2,500 each for the injuries they received when their house was smashed (and another $1,800 for the destroyed house), with Ogden noting that Teresa “has been virtually housebound except to attend her mother’s funeral.” In her interrogatory, Teresa stated: “I have suffered since and am still suffering from the effects of my injuries, and I am informed that my sufferings are due to the shock. I have more or less constant handshaking, loss of sleep, loss of appetite, apprehension and nervous exhaustion.” Ogden awarded no money to Stephen Clougherty, who died in the insane asylum eleven months after the flood, concluding that the accident had “nothing to do with his death.”

Walter Merrithew, who was rescued by the deaf mute in the freight house, received $500 for an injured leg.

Ogden awarded firefighter Bill Connor $4,468, “including doctor bills,” for his injuries and pain and suffering. Connor, who was out of work for four months, eventually returned to light duty and was later assigned to the Fire Prevention Bureau.

Stonecutter John Barry, who had morphine injected into his spine three times as rescuers clawed to dig him out from under the firehouse, was awarded $4,000 by Ogden, who noted: “He will never be materially better. His back and knee will give him more or less pain as long as he lives.”

Damon Hall was ecstatic about the victory, but dissatisfied with Ogden’s damage awards. He promptly insisted on a jury trial to determine damages.

Charles Choate and the other USIA attorneys immediately offered to negotiate, and the two sides reached a “private” agreement within hours. “It was estimated that if the company had not settled, but permitted the case to go to trial and eventually lost, it would have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs of court,” the
Boston Globe
reported. “It is estimated that a jury case would have taken six more months.”

The private agreement reached between USIA and the plaintiffs was made public when USIA reported its 1925 financial results. The company took a charge against profits of $628,000 “due to the Boston tank accident,” ultimately agreeing to damage awards more than double those that Hugh Ogden had recommended.

Damon Hall, the tough street-fighting lawyer who had agreed to represent a collection of poor immigrants and city workers against a large industrial corporation at the zenith of Big Business popularity in America, had demanded true financial justice from USIA—and got it without a jury trial.

In the process, Hall’s clients, the 119 plaintiffs, had received a double victory: Hugh Ogden’s verdict, and USIA’s speedy agreement to more than double the damage awards, itself a tacit admission of the company’s guilt.

More than ten years after Arthur P. Jell had secured the property on which to build the monstrous tank, more than six years after the tank had collapsed, spewing forth a crashing deluge of 2.3 million gallons of thick, viscous liquid across the Commercial Street waterfront, the Boston molasses flood trial had come to an end.

At 11:15
P.M.
on August 22, Boston’s Charlestown prison, surrounded by eight hundred police, its walls and catwalks lined with machine guns and searchlights, was eerily silent. The streets around the prison had been roped off for a half mile, and those who lived within the area were ordered to stay indoors.

Across the Charles River, crowds gathered on the Boston Common in front of the State House, their eyes focused on the lights burning in the governor’s office.

Inside the prison, the warden walked into the death house, where Nicola Sacco was writing a letter and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was pacing in his cell. “I am sorry,” the warden said. “but it is my painful duty to inform you that you have to die tonight.” Vanzetti whispered in reply: “We must bow to the inevitable.”

A seven-year legal battle to stop Sacco and Vanzetti’s executions had failed. In May 1926, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts upheld their convictions and denied their motions for a new trial. Just two weeks ago, on August 10, 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes denied a request that he stay the executions, ruling that the case was a state, not a federal, matter. The Supreme Court denied a final petition on August 20.

Earlier this day, demonstrations protesting the executions had taken place across the country and in cities around the world. More than a hundred armed police officers surrounded the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., guarding against violence, and sixty miles away from Boston in Worcester, Massachusetts, a courthouse in which trial judge Webster Thayer was presiding over a criminal case was patrolled by armed troopers. In Paris, a general strike had halted traffic, and the American embassy was ringed with tanks to protect it from rioters. Large protests had also taken place in England, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Australia, Argentina, and South Africa, all to no avail.

Massachusetts governor Alvan T. Fuller left the State House shortly after midnight, unswayed by a bombardment of last-minute pleas to intervene and spare the two condemned men, including a long, tearful visit by Sacco’s wife and Vanzetti’s sister. “Good night, gentlemen,” he said as he passed through the group of waiting newspapermen gathered outside the State House.

At half past midnight, the morning of August 23, 1927, Sacco was strapped into the electric chair in the Charlestown prison, shouted “long live anarchy!” and then said quietly, “farewell my wife and child and all my friends.” The warden nodded and electricity surged through Sacco’s body.

Moments later, Vanzetti was led into the death chamber. He said softly: “I wish to say that I am innocent. I have never done a crime, some sins, but never any crime. I am an innocent man.” With that he shook hands with the warden and the guards and took his place in the chair. “I now wish to forgive some people for what they are doing to me,” Vanzetti said. He was dead minutes later.

The next afternoon, Dr. George Burgess Magrath, the medical examiner who had plodded through the molasses flood wreckage in his rubber hip-boots and later viewed the broken bodies of the flood victims in his morgue, performed the legally required autopsies on Sacco and Vanzetti. For several days, the bodies of the two anarchists lay in state at the Langone Funeral Home in Boston’s North End, where thousands of people visited to offer their respects.

On Sunday, August 28, thousands more congregated in the North End Playground, adjacent to where the molasses tank once stood, to take part in an eight-mile funeral procession across the city to Forest Hills Cemetery. More than two hundred thousand people thronged the route to pay tribute to the two Italian anarchists, “one of the most tremendous funerals of modern times—a gigantic cortege that marched over streets strewn with flowers …” reported the
Boston Globe
. “Never in this history of Boston has there been a demonstration quite like it.”

Sacco and Vanzetti were cremated shortly afterward.

With a few isolated exceptions, the anarchist movement, which provided U.S. Industrial Alcohol with the centerpiece of its unsuccessful defense in the molasses case, died with them.

Epilogue

T
he ten-year timeline of the molasses flood story, which began in 1915 when USIA built the tank and ended with Hugh Ogden’s decision in 1925, offers more than a dramatic prism through which to view a tumultuous decade in Boston and America. The flood saga exemplified and directly influenced events that changed the region and the nation in the short term, and shaped them for years to come.

First, the flood essentially ended three hundred years’ worth of high-volume molasses trade in Boston and New England. While some molasses distilling took place in the city up until World War II, the industry never resumed its level of importance. Sugar prices dropped markedly after the First World War, and sugar replaced molasses as a sweetener. New technologies in the production of high explosives and smokeless powder soon eliminated the need for munitions companies to rely on industrial alcohol distilled from molasses. Molasses, which had played such a key role in the American Revolution, the slave trade, the rum business, and in munitions production, slowly disappeared as a staple product in America and as a critical part of the New England economy.

The disaster’s effects also had a long-term impact on construction safety standards in Boston and across the country. Shortly after the flood, the Boston Building Department began requiring that all calculations of engineers and architects be filed with their plans and that stamped drawings be signed, a practice that became standard across the country. The molasses case influenced the adoption of engineering certification laws in all states, as well as the requirement that all plans for major structures be sealed by a registered professional engineer before a municipality or state would issue a building permit. Interestingly, the Boston molasses flood did for building construction regulations nationwide what a subsequent Boston disaster, the great Coconut Grove nightclub fire, did for fire code laws.

The flood also taught Italian immigrants in Boston and elsewhere the importance of becoming involved in the political process to protect their rights and their interests. Because most Italian immigrants shunned politics and eschewed citizenship prior to World War I, USIA was able to erect its huge storage tank with barely a whimper of protest from the North End neighborhood. Following the molasses hearings, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the citizenship rate among Italians increased sharply. There were many reasons for this, to be sure, but one of those was a growing realization among Italians that citizenship and the right to vote was the only way to control their neighborhood and their destiny. Not surprisingly, as citizenship and assimilation among Italians increased, anti-immigrant sentiments began to wane.

Finally, and most importantly, the molasses flood and the court decision that followed marked a symbolic turning point in the country’s attitudes toward Big Business, which for most of the first quarter of the twentieth century had been subjected to few regulations to safeguard the public (government mandates during the First World War dealt more with taxation and production quotas than worker or public safety issues). Damon Hall noted in his closing argument: “When this tank was built, the first rush of the war was on, the opportunity was open to American contractors to make big money, and so they [USIA] said, ‘to hell with the public, give us the tank.’ ”

After the molasses hearings, despite continued economic prosperity and a strong pro-business attitude in Washington, the public began to fight back. Hugh Ogden’s strong language and clear verdict against USIA in 1925 showed that the country had come a long way in ten years; a corporation
could
be made to pay for wanton negligence of the sort that led to the construction, with virtually no oversight or testing, of a monstrous tank capable of holding 26 million pounds of molasses in a congested neighborhood.

The feeling that Big Business could not be trusted to police itself grew stronger in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Citizens demanded, and got, broader regulations and government oversight in the marketplace, especially after prosperity ended with the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. It was the people’s skeptical attitudes toward business that helped elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt president in 1932, fueling the popularity of the New Deal and a new era in America. “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” Roosevelt said during his inauguration speech. “We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit … I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

As the flood itself has receded in Boston’s collective memory, so, too, have the players in this tragedy. Most have faded quietly into history, and some disappear entirely (Isaac Gonzales, Giuseppe Iantosca, and John Barry, to name a few). Still others, most notably the legal luminaries, continued their prestigious work and earned public recognition until they died, but since then, their names have been relegated to history’s footnotes.

For the most part, these were ordinary people caught up in a tragic event, one that ushered in a year of turmoil in the United States, and later, served as a catalyst for government to impose new safety regulations on industry to protect the public.

Here is what we know about some of the people who were part of this story:

LUIGI GALLEANI, the deported leader of the Italian anarchist movement in America, was eventually arrested by Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy. He spent three years in prison, and was then exiled to an island off the Sicilian coast. In February 1930, in failing health, he was allowed to return to the mainland, where he retired to the mountain village of Capriglioa. He died of a heart attack on November 4, 1931 at age seventy, shortly after returning home from his morning walk.

WILLIAM CONNOR, the Boston firefighter who was trapped under the firehouse and heard George Layhe’s cries for help, died on February 6, 1951 at age seventy. He remained a Boston firefighter until 1940, but his injuries hindered his career. He was reduced in rank to a “hoseman” in April 1920 because he could not handle full duties. He retired with a disability pension of $1,400 per year.

NATHANIEL “NAT” BOWERING, Connor’s buddy who kicked debris away from the hole to allow molasses to flow out, died in 1975 at age eighty-six. He remained a firefighter until 1956, but recurring back and spine injuries, traced to the time he spent trapped under the firehouse, nagged him through his career. He retired with a disability pension of $3,240 per year.

MARTIN CLOUGHERTY, who clung to his bedframe “raft” and rescued his sister, Teresa, from the flood, remained a proprietor of a Revere, Massachusetts, hotel during the 1920s, after the Pen and Pencil Club closed on January 17, 1920, when Prohibition went into effect. We know nothing more about him.

ANTONIO DISTASIO, Maria’s brother, who suffered a fractured skull in the flood, went on to become a boxer and fought two hundred bouts under the name “Kayo.” He died at age eighty-six after caring for his wife, who was hospitalized with Alzheimer’s disease. “She’s the most beautiful girl in the world,” he told a
Boston Globe
reporter who visited his apartment in 1990. “I got two bedrooms here and I’m waiting for her to come home, but it looks bad. Every time I talk about it, I start crying.”

ARTHUR P. JELL, assistant treasurer of USIA, worked at the company’s New York City headquarters throughout the hearing and while Ogden was writing his verdict. Little is known of Jell; records are inconclusive, but they indicate that he lived in New Jersey, later moved to Maryland, and died in 1963 at age eighty-five.

CHARLES F. CHOATE, JR., lead lawyer for USIA, who argued passionately in favor of the “anarchist” theory, collapsed from an apparent heart attack in U.S. District Court on November 30, 1927, two years after Ogden’s decision, and three months after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Choate was taken to nearby Massachusetts General Hospital (where he was a vice president of the board), where he had a second heart attack and died, ending a distinguished legal career.

The law firm Choate started in 1898 with John Hall, later joined in partnership by Ralph A. Stewart, became Choate, Hall & Stewart, today one of Boston’s most prestigious law firms.

DAMON HALL, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, who won the case (and not the “Hall” in Choate, Hall & Stewart), died in his hometown of Belmont, Massachusetts, a week before Christmas in 1953, just two weeks after his seventy-eighth birthday.

After the molasses trial, he went on to serve as special assistant attorney general of Massachusetts in a legislative investigation of the Boston Police Department in 1930, and was named a member of the Salvation Army advisory board in Boston. He was active in Belmont town politics for many years.

His description of the flood rings as true as any words about the disaster: “It was a tremendous calamity which would appeal to everything that is human in mankind, yet was treated with the utmost indifference by the defendant.”

HUGH W. OGDEN, auditor and soldier, died on September 3, 1938, at age sixty-six, while he and his wife, Lisbeth, were on holiday in Bath, England. Ogden, who had been born in Bath, Maine, made the trip to his “sister city” annually. “He was one of Boston’s most prominent attorneys and a soldier with a distinguished record,” the
New York Times
reported in its obituary.

Closer to home, the
Boston Herald
editorialized: “With hardly an exception, his clients became his friends. They trusted him. Nobody will ever know how many cases he took for which he received only a nominal fee or none at all, simply because he saw a duty which somebody ought to perform.”

It is likely, though, that Hugh Ogden the soldier would have been most pleased and honored by the ceremony at the American Legion Post in his hometown of Brookline. The post commander presented Lisbeth with a framed copy of the official resolution memorializing Ogden’s career, and offered these words:

“Colonel Ogden was a distinguished soldier, a conscientious and upright citizen, an eminent and brilliant lawyer, and a true and devoted Legionnaire … We will miss his friendly greeting, his kindly smile, and his unselfish service … He was a modest man, a tolerant man, a brave man, a sincere man, and—above all—an honorable man.”

The plaintiffs in the Boston Molasses Flood case would no doubt agree.