NINE 
February 1919
Bostonians must have been bewildered, even angry, when they picked up their morning newspapers on Saturday, February 8, 1919, less than a month after the molasses tank collapsed, and read that a seething Judge Wilfred Bolster was blaming them for the disaster.
Not only them. He chided the Boston Building Department for its cursory examination of USIA’s plans to construct the tank and for the “incompetent” people who reviewed those plans. He scolded USIA and Arthur P. Jell for failing to verify the tank’s safety and relying solely on the assurance of the manufacturer.
But in his inquest report filed in the office of the clerk of the Superior Criminal Court, Bolster blasted the public for its failure both to adequately fund its city inspection departments and to insist on qualified people to staff them. “The chief blame rests upon the public itself,” Bolster declared. “This single accident has cost more in material damage alone than all the supposed economics in the building department. Laws are cheap of passage, costly of enforcement. They do not execute themselves. A public which, with one eye on the tax rate, provides itself with an administrative equipment 50 percent qualified, has no right to complain that it does not get a 100 percent product—and so far as it accepts political influence as the equivalent of scientific positions which demand such attainment in a high degree, so long it must expect breakdowns in its machinery.”
Still, Bolster acknowledged that the public’s “error of judgment” was not negligence, and that the only party that could be held criminally responsible for the tank disaster was U.S. Industrial Alcohol. “The only assignable crime involved is manslaughter, through negligence,” Bolster said. “My conclusion from all this evidence is that this tank was wholly insufficient in point of structural strength to handle its load, insufficient to meet either legal or engineering requirements. This structure being maintained in violation of the law, the lessee has incurred the penalty which is absolute. I have therefore ordered process against the United States Industrial Alcohol Company.”
Based on Bolster’s inquest report, District Attorney Joseph Pelletier presented evidence to a grand jury the following week. “The evidence tends to show that the huge tank collapsed by reason of faulty construction and not because of an explosion,” he said.
Five days after hearing the evidence that Pelletier presented, the grand jury issued its report. It agreed that the structure did not comply with the law, and that the building department gave USIA authority to put up the structure in a way “not permitted by the law.”
In addition: “The Grand Jury concurs with the expression of Chief Justice Bolster that no matter of expense of qualified employees should deter the city from making a most thorough examination of all plans and materials submitted before issuing a permit.”
However, on the larger issue of criminal negligence, the grand jury ruled that there was insufficient evidence to justify, or return, an indictment for manslaughter. There would be no criminal charges brought against anyone in the molasses flood case.
Two days later, on February 14, MIT professor C.M. Spofford, who had been hired by Boston Elevated to examine and test pieces of the tank, reported that the steel plates were of “insufficient thickness” to withstand the pressure of molasses, and that there were not enough rivets to fasten the tank sufficiently. “In my judgment, the tank was improperly designed and its failure was due entirely to structural weakness,” Spofford stated in his report. “The stresses due to the static pressure of the molasses alone were so great that the whole structure was in a dangerous condition.”
USIA dismissed the assertions of Bolster, Pelletier, and Spofford, and instead was heartened and emboldened by the grand jury’s failure to issue indictments. In a brief statement, its last until civil proceedings began in 1920, the company reiterated its belief that evilly disposed persons had used dynamite to blow up the tank, and that USIA bore no responsibility for the disaster.
The Boston molasses disaster was the first in a series of events that disrupted the equilibrium of the city and the country in 1919, events that generated first uneasiness, and then fear and disillusionment, across the land. The euphoria that had accompanied the armistice in November 1918 had dissipated, and Bostonians and Americans struggled to make sense of a nation that seemed to be spinning out of control in February and March of the new year.
It was a year that began with returning soldiers and sailors flooding the civilian labor market even as government war production contracts were being canceled. In addition, with the wartime shortage of labor in 1917 and 1918, blacks from the South had migrated to northern industrial cities seeking jobs, a practice they continued after the war ended. Now, blacks, whites, and returning veterans were battling for fewer jobs, all in the midst of rising prices and a soaring cost of living.
As a result, labor unrest was sweeping industry and government from coast to coast. In Massachusetts, a violent strike erupted in the textile mills of nearby Lawrence, and soon after, more than twelve thousand telephone workers employed by the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company walked off their jobs. Both groups were seeking higher wages, a forty-eight-hour workweek, and stronger collective bargaining rights. The telephone operators, who earned $16 per week, demanded $22, and finally settled for $19 after a one-week strike. Despite its short duration, the strike alarmed and disrupted the business community—it was an ominous sign of discontent among American workers.
There were more. Boston Police, who were beginning their contract negotiations with the city, rejected a $100 annual raise, and also rejected a compromise $140 raise (10 percent), adopting the slogan, “$200 or nothing.”
Elsewhere, thirty-five thousand dressmakers in New York struck for a forty-four-hour week and a 15 percent pay increase, and more than sixty thousand workers struck in Seattle, bringing the seaport city to a standstill. This “general strike,” the notion that a city could be paralyzed by work stoppages, made Americans uneasy, even more so when a labor newspaper in Seattle editorialized, “We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by Labor in the country … We are starting on a road that leads—no one knows where.”
Historian Francis Russell noted that inadequate working conditions and rising prices both frightened and galvanized workers. “Wherever one turned, in industry or transportation or public service, there seemed to be a strike or threatened strike,” he said. “To add to the malaise, prices, instead of falling, continued to rise. The value of the 1914 dollar had dropped to only forty-five cents. Food costs had gone up 84 percent, clothes, 114 percent. For the average American family, the cost of living was double what it had been five years earlier, and income had lagged behind. Professional classes, from clergymen and professors to clerks, state and city employees, firemen and police, found themselves worse off than at any time since the Civil War.”
The uncertainty bred by these woeful economic conditions, coupled with the strikes and threatened work stoppages, focused the public’s attention on—and fueled its fear of—domestic radicals such as Socialists, IWW, and anarchists, who were often blamed for the social unrest. In mid-February, the Bureau of Immigration deported between seven thousand and eight thousand aliens “as rapidly as they can be rounded up and put on ships.” The mayor of Seattle, Ole Hanson, toured the country following the strike in his city, warning of the Red menace in the United States. A Lawrence, Massachusetts, Citizens’ Committee announced plans to “wage war on Bolshevism” and root out labor agitators. A radical labor leader was arrested in Cleveland in connection with a conspiracy to kill President Wilson.
The domestic tension affected international diplomacy as well. President Wilson, fresh off successful negotiations in Paris for both the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, faced strong opposition on the League from Republicans in the Senate, led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. GOP senators believed that the League would jeopardize American sovereignty and become “an impediment to the independence of this country.” Lodge and other Republican senators wanted the Treaty and the League of Nations severed in their ratification discussions; President Wilson believed that they were inextricably linked.
Wilson decided to make Boston the first American city that he would visit following the Versailles peace conference, and sailed from Paris in mid-February. It would be his first visit to Boston as president, and his goal was to speak directly to the people to promote the League in the state in which the leading Republican, Lodge, had been its staunchest and most vociferous opponent.
The day before Wilson’s arrival, Secret Service agents and members of the New York Police Department arrested fourteen Spanish anarchists in Manhattan and charged them with conspiracy to assassinate the president. Acting on an anonymous tip, the agents raided a Lexington Avenue home, expecting to find loaded bombs that the anarchists were planning to set off in Boston. Neither bombs nor explosives were found, and the anarchists were not carrying firearms, but agents said they found documentary evidence that proved that radicals had planned to kill the president using dynamite.
While Wilson’s ship, the George Washington, was at sea, an anarchist shot and wounded French premier Georges Clemenceau in Paris. One of the three shots that struck him pierced a lung, but Clemenceau later recovered.
The attempted assassination and the anarchist plot cast a grim pall over Wilson’s return to America and led to extraordinary security precautions for his Boston visit. Warships escorted the George Washington through the harbor when it arrived at the city’s Commonwealth Pier on Monday morning, February 24. Once Wilson set foot on Boston soil, a contingent of Secret Service, troops, police, and detectives guarded him and his entourage for the entire length of his visit. A solid line of troops, led by the Massachusetts State Guard Cavalry, maintained vigilance on horseback along Wilson’s parade route, as he made his way to Mechanics Hall to deliver his remarks.
More than five hundred thousand people lined Boston’s streets to cheer the president, and Bostonians greeted Wilson warmly, but there was something disquieting about Secret Service agents armed with rifles lining the rooftops, and windows being ordered closed during the president’s drive by. His visit to Boston was brief and nothing untoward occurred, but Francis Russell noted, “the fear remained, a fear that Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson gave voice to when he warned an apprehensive middle-class audience that ‘recent events at Lawrence, Seattle … and other places were not industrial, economic disputes in their origin, but were results of a deliberate, organized attempt at a social and political movement to establish Soviet Governments in the United States.’”
Two days after President Wilson left Boston, Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani, himself awaiting deportation, delivered an incendiary speech in Taunton, Massachusetts. The next evening, in the nearby town of Franklin, four Italian anarchists, all ardent Galleanists, blew themselves up in what police believed was a botched plot to destroy the mill of the American Woolen Company where they worked and where a strike was in progress. Federal authorities arrested three other men in the conspiracy on March 1. The newly sworn-in U.S. attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, promised a nationwide crackdown on “aliens and Bolsheviks, radicals, and anarchists” who were roaming the country, disrupting its peace, and terrorizing its people.
April 9, 1919
Martin Clougherty made the most difficult decision of his life with little fanfare and a clear conscience.
For nearly three months, his mentally deficient brother, Stephen, had been living with a cousin. But Stephen’s condition had deteriorated so profoundly that the normally docile young man had been hallucinating and prone to violence. The latest incident had occurred yesterday, when the afternoon shadows had fallen across his bedroom. Stephen screamed inconsolably, babbling that the building was about to collapse and crush him and that he would be smothered in molasses. Martin had witnessed the panic attack and had made the decision on the spot to commit Stephen to the Boston State Hospital for the insane in the city’s Mattapan section.
He had no choice. Stephen had been visibly upset since he had been rescued from the molasses on January 15, but now he was uncontrollable.
This afternoon, Martin had accompanied his brother to the hospital and signed the commitment papers. He stayed with Stephen while they prepared his room. When the nurse tried to take his temperature, Stephen Clougherty hurled the thermometer across the floor.
Martin retrieved the thermometer, apologized to the nurse, and touched his brother’s shoulder. He left then, promising Stephen that he would visit soon.
April 28–May 1, 1919
As May Day approached, anarchists grew bolder. Angry about economic conditions and Galleani’s impending deportation, they mailed package bombs to some of the nation’s most prominent and influential citizens, most especially those who had spoken out against aliens, radicals, IWW members, and labor leaders.
On April 28, a package containing a homemade bomb was sent to Seattle mayor Hanson, who, after the general strike in his city, had railed against “scoundrels who want to take possession of our American Government and try to duplicate the anarchy of Russia.” Hanson was in Colorado, fulfilling a speaking engagement, when the parcel arrived. Luckily, his assistant opened the package from the wrong end; the bomb failed to go off and the assistant summoned police. Another bomb, sent to the home of Georgia’s former senator Thomas Hardwick, co-sponsor of the 1918 deportation bill, did find a target, exploding as the Hardwicks’s maid opened the package, blowing off both of her hands.
The Hardwick bombing made headlines across the nation, and on April 30, orders went out to all post offices to be on the lookout for suspicious packages. In all, inspectors discovered thirty-four “May Day” bomb packages in the mail before delivery, addressed to people such as Attorney General Palmer, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson (who had banned radical literature from the mail), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (who had sentenced Big Bill Haywood and other IWW leaders), Commissioner General of Immigration Anthony Caminetti, and multimillionaires John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. Not a single bomb harmed its intended victim. No one was killed, and the Hardwick maid was the only person to suffer serious injury. Postmaster General Burleson attributed the outcome to the vigilance of his department’s employees.
Americans were outraged, and newspapers clamored for action. The New York Times called it the “most widespread assassination conspiracy in the history of the country.” Law enforcement responded with immediate crackdowns. Police and citizens, including ex-soldiers and ex-sailors, rousted and disrupted radicals who gathered to commemorate May Day in Cleveland, New York, and Boston, according to historian Paul Avrich. The worst of these disturbances occurred in Boston, where parading radicals in Roxbury were set upon by indignant bystanders, “chased through the streets, beaten, trampled, and kicked.” Shots were exchanged, a police captain died of a heart attack during the melee, and all told 116 demonstrators were arrested, including followers of Galleani.
Tried before Judge Albert F. Hayden at the Roxbury Municipal Court, fourteen demonstrators were found guilty of disturbing the peace and sentenced to several months in prison. After sentencing, Hayden blasted “foreigners who think they can get away with their doctrines in this country … if I could have my way I would send them and their families back to the country from which they came.”
As it had been for the past three years, Boston remained the hot-bed for Italian anarchist activities. In the spring of 1919, the nerves of citizens and police were frayed and the city had become a powder keg. Bostonians wondered when and what kind of spark it would take to set off an explosion.
May 12, 1919
Nearly four months after the molasses disaster, the body of Cesare Nicolo was pulled from the water, out from under the wharf near the Boston & Worcester Commercial Street freight station. His wife, Josie, identified his body.
The flood had claimed its twentieth victim.
Monday, June 2, 1919
Malcolm Hayden, the twenty-year-old son of Roxbury District Court Judge Albert F. Hayden, was walking home just before midnight when a touring car traveling in the other direction sped past him, nearly climbing the sidewalk and sideswiping him as it turned the corner and raced away down Blue Hill Avenue. The car had appeared suddenly out of the darkness, from the direction of the Hayden home on Wayne Street. In the few seconds that he saw the vehicle as it flashed by him, Malcolm wondered why the roof was up, considering the late-night humidity. A heat wave had gripped Boston for the past week. The temperature had approached 100 degrees today, and even now, had to still be pushing eighty. A beautiful night for a walk or a drive, Malcolm thought, until the careening automobile had missed him by inches.
The car disappeared and the night stillness returned. The street was dark and deserted at this hour, the only sound the snap of Malcolm’s shoes on the pavement as he continued down Wayne Street. He had enjoyed dinner and drinks with friends (how many more such nights would they enjoy with Prohibition approaching?) and he was so tired he expected to be asleep in minutes. He was alone now on the street and would be alone when he reached his house; his parents and sister had been away for the past week at the family’s summer home in nearby Plymouth.
Malcolm was two hundred feet from his front door when the midnight quiet was shattered by a deafening explosion ahead of him. He felt the searing heat from the blast sweep across his face, and the explosion’s concussive force pound his eardrums and knock him off his feet. From the ground, he watched the front of his house crumble, the second-level piazza shudder and crash to the lawn.
Scrambling to regain his feet, the first thought that entered Malcolm Hayden’s head—before he consciously wondered why the Haydens had been targeted and by whom—was how thankful he was that the house was empty.
As his neighbors streamed onto the street in their nightclothes, Malcolm sprinted toward his house to see how much damage the bomb had done.
Had he left the saloon and arrived home two minutes earlier, Malcolm Hayden would have been blown to pieces. The entire front of the Hayden house had been destroyed by the bomb that had been placed against a main support column, just under Malcolm’s bedroom window. The blast also had blown out windows and ripped shingles from the roof of the house next door. Both homes, among the finest in Boston’s Roxbury section, sustained thousands of dollars in damage.
What the Wayne Street neighborhood would find out the next day was that the dynamite bombing of the Hayden house was part of an organized anarchist conspiracy unleashed in Boston and six other major cities, including Washington, D.C., when powerful bombs exploded almost simultaneously, all going off within an hour of midnight, all planted at the homes of prominent persons who were involved in antiradical or anti-anarchist activities. This included United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose home in the fashionable northwest section of Washington, D.C., was destroyed while he and his family slept on the second floor. The bomb, planted under the steps of Palmer’s home, destroyed most of the dwelling and smashed in windows of houses as far as a block away, but miraculously did not injure Palmer, who was reading near a front window of an upstairs bedroom and was showered with glass, or his wife, asleep in a rear bedroom.
Within minutes an army of policemen, firemen, and federal agents were at the scene, according to historian Paul Avrich. At the same time, policemen and soldiers were placed at the homes of other officials in possible danger, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, who lived in Palmer’s exclusive neighborhood.
While searching the scene around Palmer’s house, police made a remarkable discovery: The bomb had blown to bits the man who had planted it. Police believed that the bomb exploded prematurely before it could be planted under the house. Fragments of the bomber’s body were scattered all over the neighborhood. An intact Italian-English dictionary was also discovered near the Palmer house. While police never identified the dead bomber, Avrich concluded that the evidence pointed to Carlo Valdinoci, a dedicated follower of Galleani. Avrich also surmised that both Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, militant anarchists, were involved in the conspiracy.
At each bomb site—Boston, Washington, New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Paterson, New Jersey—police also found leaflets, printed on pink paper, bearing the title Plain Words and signed by “The Anarchist Fighters.” The leaflet, in style and content, resembled the Go-Head! flyer that police had found near the Boston waterfront at the time of the molasses disaster. The message of the text was indeed plain enough: “There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder; we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we shall not rest until your downfall is complete and the laboring masses have taken possession of all that rightfully belongs to them … Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny.”
In Boston, Judge Hayden was defiant, acknowledging that he was targeted because of the stern sentences he imposed on the May Day rioters, and his harsh anti-anarchist comments in the courtroom. “I cannot be intimidated,” he said the morning after the explosion destroyed his home. “It was not done to intimidate me, but to intimidate the whole community. We have got to defeat the Bolshevists; we have got to deport them. They should not be allowed in this country. They should all be deported at once. I do not believe they know what they want. It is force, force, force. That’s all they want.”
True to his word, Hayden was not intimidated. When police arrested a Russian anarchist, Ernest Graudat, and charged him with being one of the bombers of the judge’s Roxbury home, Hayden presided over Graudat’s arraignment.
The brazen nature of the June 2 bombings sent another wave of fear and anger rippling across the country, particularly after the Secret Service announced that they believed the same group of anarchists had sent the May Day bombs through the mail. “These obviously coordinated explosions, their shocking, outrageous character, the bloodthirsty language of the leaflets, fueled passions that had been building for months and gave powerful impetus to the unfolding Red Scare,” noted Paul Avrich.
Nor did federal spokesmen allay the panic. The Department of Justice declared the bombings to be part of an organized, nationwide conspiracy to overthrow the American government. Further explosions were predicted. A campaign had been launched, as one official put it, to start a “reign of terror in the United States.” Attorney General Palmer said those, “who can not or will not live the life of Americans under our institutions … should go back to the countries from which they came.” The day after the bombings, he said: “The outrages of last night … will only increase and extend the activities of our crime detecting forces. We are determined now, as heretofore, that organized crime directed against organized government in this country shall be stopped.”
Palmer wasted little time. He beefed up the Justice Department, especially the Bureau of Investigation, whose General Intelligence Division was supervised by J. Edgar Hoover. This set the scene for the notorious “Palmer raids” during the fall of 1919 and winter of 1920, in which more than three thousand aliens would undergo deportation proceedings, and eight hundred, including many anarchists, would be evicted from the country.
Most Americans supported Palmer’s actions, but many abuses occurred. “Arrests were made without warrant, men were beaten without provocation,” said Avrich. “The raids were carried out with utter indifference to legality. Thousands of aliens were taken into custody and subjected to brutal treatment.” But a law journal cited the more popular view that national safety was the priority: “There is only one way to deal with anarchy and that is to crush it, not with a slap on the wrist, but a broad-axe on the neck.”
Bostonians, for the most part, shared the majority view, especially when Boston Police announced that the city was the nation’s “Bolshevist headquarters” and that some of the Boston Anarchists were involved in the June 2 explosions in other cities. “I would ask every citizen—man, woman, and child—to be mindful of his duty and to report anything of a suspicious nature that he might discover,” Police Superintendent Michael Crowley requested. “Secret meetings in any part of the city must be watched closely, and information regarding such gatherings should be communicated to police.”
As the summer of 1919 approached, the terror and suspicion that gripped the nation was felt most acutely in Boston, where residents believed that anarchists had burrowed deep into the fabric of their city, and worse, that they were capable of anything.
July 7, 1919, Washington, D.C.
Lt. Col. Hugh Walker Ogden sat in the prestigious Cosmos Club lounge, his pen poised above a sheet of the club’s stationery. The club was located on Lafayette Square, the social headquarters for Washington’s intellectual elite, in the former Dolly Madison House, named after the wife of the fourth president. It had a shabby elegance, and a comfortable charm, and it suited Ogden well.
He had a simple note to write to his friend Horace Lippincott at the University of Pennsylvania, but the occasion had him reviewing his past and pondering his future. He had spent the last two years preaching and instilling discipline—into soldiers at the front, into the Rainbow Division’s command structure, and for the last two months, into the Army’s court-martial procedures as part of a review committee appointed by the secretary of war. The committee had just recommended that court-martial procedures remain stringent, despite criticism that penalties handed out during the European war were often too harsh for the crimes that soldiers committed. He and his two colleagues, both major generals, believed that relaxed court-martial standards would lead to a breakdown in overall discipline, morale, and battlefield unity.
Now, days after the commission had issued its report and three weeks before his discharge and his return to private practice in Boston, Ogden believed discipline in civilian life was crumbling. The country was in turmoil, its fundamental values being battered by anarchists, labor unionists, and other radicals. The sense of order he had relished as a soldier, the order he craved, had given way to a frightening chaos across America.
He had been in Washington during the bombing of Attorney General Palmer’s house and had read about the damage to Judge Hayden’s home in Boston. It angered him that two sentinels of law and order could come so close to death, without provocation, simply by virtue of their positions. He had been anxious for months to return to civilian life and make a fundamental difference as a lawyer, make a contribution that extended beyond mundane corporate work and encompassed some of the moral nobility of his military service; today, in a country whose moral compass appeared to be broken, it appeared that his commitment was needed more desperately than ever.
Ogden’s review of his recent past was not without a sense of satisfaction. He had just been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for “exceptionally meritorious services” as judge advocate with the Rainbow Division. “He rendered valuable services and exhibited ability of a high order throughout the operations of the division,” the citation read. “Later assigned to the Bureau of Civil Affairs for the Third Army, he performed his task with marked success.”
As a Distinguished Service Medal recipient, he was in good company. The medal was confirmed by an Act of Congress in July 1918, and awarded to those who distinguished themselves with outstanding service “in a duty of great responsibility” in a combat or noncombat role. At the direction of the president of the United States, the first recipients of the medal were the commander of the Allied armies, including General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, “as a token of gratitude of the American people to the commander of our armies in the field.”
Ogden thought the news of his Distinguished Service Medal award was worth sharing with Lippincott and the University of Pennsylvania community. “The enclosed War Department order just published containing the citation for my DSM may be of interest to my friends,” he wrote simply on Cosmos Club stationery, no embellishment or other comment needed.
Ogden loved soldiering, loved serving his country, and he felt that it was his duty to set a good example. He believed he had accomplished this during his service in France and Germany, and with the work he had done in Washington, D.C. The Distinguished Service Medal seemed to him fitting confirmation of and recognition for his contributions, and an appropriate way to close an important and rewarding chapter in his life.
Ogden sealed the envelope to Lippincott and headed for the door of the Cosmos Club. It was time to go home to Boston, to a city and a nation that he no longer recognized, and begin the next chapter.
August 1919
United States Industrial Alcohol reported to authorities in mid-August that two of its molasses steamers had vanished without a trace—and without any distress calls—en route from the Caribbean to the northeast. Both steamers had full loads, and USIA assumed both had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The disappearances were bizarre and unprecedented.
Though it was never proven, the company blamed the disappearance of both vessels on anarchists. USIA executives said that only the sudden and powerful explosion of bombs could have obliterated any evidence of the ships and prevented either captain from issuing a call for help.
USIA said the destruction of its ships was a continuation of the attacks against the company by anarchists, attacks that had begun with the bombing of its Boston molasses tank seven months earlier.
September 1919
September would be the darkest month of all.
It had been eight months since the molasses flood had ushered in a year of turmoil: a year when labor battled business; when the cost of living rose and workers demanded that their wages rise, too; when anarchists preached and practiced violence in the name of justice; when xenophobia exploded and isolationist declarations boomed through the halls of Congress.
A torrid and turbulent summer in Boston had provided a preview of a bleak September. Even as record heat and humidity smothered the city, tensions smoldered among the workers and the general public.
In late June, anarchist leader Luigi Galleani was deported to Italy as scheduled, along with eight associates. The anarchist leader had escaped arrest when federal agents, after questioning the men, were unable to prove their suspicions that Galleani had orchestrated the June bombings.
On July 4, five thousand New England fishermen began a job stoppage that would last more than a month, tying up shipping and driving the price of fish skyward. Then in mid-July, a storm of protest greeted Boston Elevated’s announcement that fares would increase to ten cents. Two days later, the trains and streetcars stopped running when more than seven thousand members of the Carmen’s Union went on strike for four days until their demands for an eight-hour day and payment of seventy-three cents per hour were met.
Nationally, rail workers threatened to strike in August and paralyze the nation’s transportation system unless Congress took actions to deal with the high cost of living and increase wages. President Wilson asked Congress to defer its planned five-week summer recess to consider the demands and hammer out legislation to avert a nationwide rail shutdown.
The widespread summer storminess set the stage for September, which started on a hopeful enough note. President Wilson left Washington, D.C., on September 4 for a thirty-city, twenty-five-day, eight-thousand-mile tour of Midwestern and Western states to generate support for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, a journey described as “longer than (his trip) to France and back and more strenuous.”
But the country’s brief optimism and promise over Wilson’s commitment to peace were dashed on September 9, when the national spotlight focused on Boston once again.
Nearly 1,400 Boston police officers went on strike after the 5:45 P.M. roll call, angry that their wage demands had not been met. That night, riots broke out across the city, and mobs smashed windows, looted more than fifty stores, and threw stones at striking police officers. “Wave of crime sweeps city,” the Boston Herald’s headlines shouted the next day. During a second night of rioting, three men were killed and another fifteen injured. In all, eight people died in the strike, seventy-five were injured or wounded, and an estimated $300,000 worth of property was stolen or destroyed. Mayor Peters called in the State Guard to restore order in downtown Boston and surrounding neighborhoods.
The unprecedented strike of public safety officers shocked the nation and drew angry denunciations. Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge flayed the striking policemen, calling their actions a “deliberate intention to intimidate and coerce the government of this Commonwealth … No man has a right to place his own ease or convenience or the opportunity of making money above his duty to the state.” Supporting the use of troops to restore order, The Boston Herald added in a blistering editorial: “The police of Boston, having mutinied, stood by and saw the hoodlums loot the city, in some instances abetting the violence and disorder …” Speaking in Montana on September 11, an outraged President Wilson said that for the policemen of a great city to go on strike, “leaving the city at the mercy of thugs, was a crime against civilization. The obligation of a policeman was as sacred and direct as the obligation of a soldier.”
Unsurprisingly, in sharp contrast to Coolidge and Wilson, AF of L President Samuel Gompers told a Congressional committee that the Boston police strike benefited police across the country, “because it has moved city officials everywhere to devise plans for better pay for members of police forces.”
The Boston police walk-out acted as a catalyst for steelworkers, who, on September 20, declared strikes against the major steel companies. More than three hundred thousand workers in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland, and Youngstown, Ohio—demanding higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions—struck against Carnegie, Bethlehem, and U.S. Steel. Workers were looking to abolish the grueling twelve-hour workday, and improve what they saw as dangerous safety conditions in the mills and squalid living conditions in company-controlled steel towns. Riots marked the opening days of the strike, as workers threw bricks and rocks at state police, local officers, and replacement workers brought in by the companies. One striker was killed and seven wounded on the first day of striking when guards in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, fired into a mob of rioters who attacked nonstriking workers attempting to get into the mill.
The steel strike would last for months, pitting powerful men like Elbert H. Gary, the chairman of U.S. Steel, against John Fitzpatrick, chairman of the Conference Committee of twenty-four steel unions. In a fiery speech in October to the Illinois Federation of Labor, Fitzpatrick declared: “Out of this strike is going to come a consciousness on the part of the workers that they are a real force and factor in this industry … that even if the United States Steel Corporation can set itself up as bigger than the United States Government, there is still a greater power here, and that power rests with the workers themselves …”
But the companies held firm against worker demands, broke the strike, and effectively ended significant union influence in the steel industry until the mid-1930s.
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.
December 1919
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.
December 11, 1919
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.
December 21, 1919
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.