Dark Tide (9 page)

Now, kicking rubble and glass out of his way as he walked along the debris-strewn street near the police station, he knew that these lawbreakers needed to be dealt with harshly. It was a stroke of fortune that the explosion had taken place so early on a Sunday morning; the streets surrounding the station were deserted and no passersby had been in the blast’s direct path. Still, police officers inside the station and innocent civilians living in the nearby tenements could have been injured or killed by this cowardly act. The state chemist on the scene, a man named Walter Wedger, told police that
eighteen to twenty sticks of dynamite
had been used to fashion this bomb, and that the explosion could be heard and felt across the harbor in East Boston. “This is without any question the biggest explosion of this character which has ever happened in Boston,” Wedger said.

White knew that anarchists had been active in the North End during the last few months, knew also of the bomb that had been found at USIA’s Brooklyn plant in June and that yesterday’s explosion had been much too close for comfort. White also theorized that the police station bomb was planted in reprisal against Boston Police for the arrests of several anarchists after a violent antimilitary preparedness riot in North Square in early December. The newspapers called it the “liveliest riot” the neighborhood had ever seen. More than twenty-five shots were fired by police and protestors, though no one was hit by gunfire. Ten demonstrators were arrested, including Alphonsus Fargotti, who was charged with assault with intent to kill for slashing a police officer with a fifteen-inch knife blade. The Friday before the explosion at the police station, a judge bound Fargotti’s case over for action by a Suffolk County grand jury, a decision Saturday’s newspapers reported. White believed that Fargotti’s allies made a bold and violent statement in response, striking at law enforcement’s heart—a station house where police worked and slept.

What White did not know was that Fargotti was a militant anarchist, and that dozens of his allies, who were disciples of Italian anarchist leader Luigi Galleani, had taken part in the early December North Square demonstration. The event had been organized by the International Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the “Wobblies,” who had engaged in protests across America, sweeping eastward from the Rocky Mountain states, demanding economic justice for the country’s lowest paid workers. Their efforts began in 1905 with miners in Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado, and then grew to include unskilled, semiskilled, and migratory workers of all stripes, many of them blacks, women, and immigrants. Wobblies led strikes in mines, in lumber camps, and at textile mills. One of their goals was to organize workers into one giant union that would one day topple capitalism, a mission that suited anarchists just fine.

The Wobblies found particularly sympathetic ears among poor wage-earners who worked at dangerous jobs and unskilled urban immigrants who struggled to make ends meet, even amidst a robust war economy, and returned from work each day to substandard living conditions. The Wobblies and the anarchists both believed that the war was producing exorbitant profits for business at the expense of downtrodden workers. Though their agendas were not precisely the same—Wobblies favored a Socialist form of government while anarchists believed in
no
government—their staunch anticapitalist stands made them practical ideological bedfellows. It was no surprise that they often joined hands in protest movements around the country.

The early December North End riot began with an IWW meeting held in North Square, in front of the Italian immigrant Church of the Sacred Heart. Police officers had seen the rally beginning and warned IWW leaders not to speak and to refrain from distributing radical literature. One of the officers cautioned some of the audience to move along and not block the sidewalk, and the riot began. Fargotti slashed at patrolman William Cogan with a butcher’s knife, slicing the officer’s overcoat and severing a tendon in Cogan’s right hand. Close by, a few people in the crowd started shooting. One police officer wrested a .32 caliber automatic from a demonstrator. The sound of the riot was heard blocks away. Additional officers from the Salutation Street and Hanover Street stations arrived quickly, dispersed the crowd, and made arrests. Police found a fully loaded pistol in Fargotti’s pocket after they arrested him.

The North Square riot and the Salutation Street Police Station bombing proved to White that the IWW and the anarchists had grown bolder. They preached passionately against government, Big Business, and the war in Europe, and the USIA tank on Commercial Street was an instrument—and a symbol—for all three. “Continue the good war,” Galleani had written, “the war that knows neither fear nor scruples, neither pity nor truce … When we talk about property, State, masters, government, laws, courts, and police, we say only that
we don’t want any of them
.”

William White’s assistant at the Commercial Street tank, Isaac Gonzales, had been suggesting for months now that USIA erect a chain-link fence around the tank property. The idea was for the tank itself to be fully surrounded by fencing and for two large swinging gates to be installed on the Commercial Street side to allow railcar access to the pumping area. The gates would be padlocked at the close of business, effectively sealing the property. White had resisted Gonzales’s suggestion, believing a fence was costly and unnecessary. Police officers guarded the tank property day and night and, up to now, their presence had provided a strong deterrent against trespassers.

But this police station bombing, a few blocks from the molasses tank and just a week before Christmas, had changed things. Authority meant nothing to these people, White thought, nor did the spirit of the season. If they were capable of sneaking a bomb into a police station and exploding the device during the holiest season of the year, they were capable of most anything.

Now White believed Gonzales was right about the fence. He would talk to Mr. Jell in the morning about authorizing the expense. USIA had signed contracts with the country’s largest munitions producers, and the company could face financial disaster if its Commercial Street operation were sabotaged.

A fence around the molasses tank would be one added level of precaution. These days, you couldn’t be too careful.

THREE

Captain Frank Van Gelder maneuvered
Miliero
expertly, hugging the coastline and riding the Gulf Stream as he headed north toward Boston and New York, carrying a full cargo of molasses. The steamer was the pride of U.S. Industrial Alcohol’s Cuba Distilling Company, the island shipping subsidiary responsible for negotiating with and purchasing molasses from the sugar cane plantation owners in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the West Indies, and transporting the thick brown liquid north to USIA’s distilling facilities in Baltimore, New York, and Boston.

Van Gelder had worked for USIA as a master of oceangoing steamers since 1910, and
Miliero
was the finest ship he had ever commanded. Launched from the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, just six months earlier, the newest steamer in the Cuba Distilling/USIA fleet was also the largest. It weighed 5,500 tons, measured nearly four hundred feet from bow to stern, and was capable of carrying more than 1.5 million gallons of molasses. Her hold was divided into sixteen separate steel compartments, each large enough to store between 100,000 and 120,000 gallons. Pumps aboard ship were used to transfer the molasses from the
Miliero’s
compartments through a ten-inch-wide discharge hose that linked to permanent pipelines connected to USIA’s different molasses tanks in the Northeast.

Van Gelder loved piloting ships, loved the sea, had captained oceangoing vessels for more than thirty years and never tired of it. He had been a master of sailing vessels up to 1893 before becoming a master of steam-powered ships. Steam power was easier to handle, and ships made more accurate time when they were not forced to rely on the randomness of the wind. Steam was better for commerce and improved the profits for the ship owners; a sailing ship caught in a dead calm halfway up the East Coast for a day or more could put a serous strain on a company’s financial resources. Not to mention the fact that a becalmed sailing ship would make a more inviting target for the Germans, who were threatening loudly to resume their U-boat submarine campaign against U.S. shipping, which they had suspended in 1916 amidst American protests.

But for all of steam’s advantages, Van Gelder missed sailing, the
art
of sailing more than anything else; figuring the gusts and the swells, positioning his crew on the sails to take advantage of a sudden shift in wind direction, the feeling of being an underdog in the battle of man against weather. The steel-hulled steamers were larger, faster, sturdier, sleeker, and more reliable, but decidedly less challenging to him.

Still, Cuba Distilling paid him well and had increased his salary since the war had begun in Europe. Under pressure to produce industrial alcohol at an unprecedented rate to meet the demands from the munitions companies, USIA had delivered clear policy messages to Van Gelder and the other Cuba Distilling captains: make sure the steamer storage tanks were filled with molasses when they left the islands; journey northward with the utmost speed; and carry out unloading procedures day and night at the storage tanks in Baltimore, New York, and Boston. Depending on the temperature of the molasses and the air temperature at the port cities, it could take several days to discharge hundreds of thousands of gallons of molasses. USIA ordered its captains to do anything they could to expedite the process, though Van Gelder was familiar enough about the peculiarities of molasses to know that the viscosity of the substance itself usually determined the pace of the transfer from the ship’s holds to the tank.

Actually, Van Gelder welcomed the opportunity to get in and out of Boston as quickly as possible. This was his third visit to the North End waterfront since the company had built the new 2.3 million-gallon tank. The previous two times, he had witnessed a sight that made him queasy in a way that thirty years at sea had never done, a sight that actually forced him to avert his eyes and carry on grimly with the mundane tasks of connecting the discharge hose to the dockside pipes and pumping molasses from the
Miliero’s
hull compartments.

It was a strange and chilling sight he and his crew members saw, though they never spoke about it, either during the pumping process or even as they pulled away from the dock and pointed the
Miliero
seaward. It was one thing for a tank to leak a bit; he had seen it dozens of times when he made deliveries up and down the East Coast.

But the steel tank in Boston, which went into operation only about one year ago, leaked more molasses through its riveted seams than any other he had seen.

Frank Van Gelder transported molasses along the East Coast following the same route that captains before him had traveled since the early 1600s. For three centuries, the molasses trade had been a vital part of the American and the New England economy, as important as fishing or textiles, and a critical component in the country’s political and social development.