ELEVEN 

FACTOR OF SAFETY

Late September 1920

As New York recovered from the Wall Street tragedy, and law enforcement authorities offered their theories on the explosion, Charles Choate was taking his expert witnesses through their own bomb story in Hugh Ogden’s Boston courtroom.

Choate’s strategy was to impress Ogden with the brainpower and credentials of the distinguished men he would call to the stand, one after another, a parade of academicians and professionals who would validate USIA’s thesis that an “evilly disposed person” had dropped an “infernal device” into the molasses tank, causing it to explode. Choate called engineering professors George E. Russell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George F. Swain of Harvard, as well as Lewis E. Moore, engineer of the Massachusetts Public Utility Commission, all of whom testified as hydraulic and structural experts. Each proffered the same conclusion: that the tank was structurally safe, although admittedly, the “factor of safety” of the tank’s walls was materially less than they would have provided. (The factor of safety is a number that describes the maximum amount of pressure the walls could withstand without buckling; a factor of safety of 3 would mean that the tank could withstand a force equivalent to three times the total pressure exerted on its walls by the contents inside.) Choate also questioned nationally renowned metallurgist Albert Colby, who spent three weeks on the stand testifying about the tensile strength of steel, its properties at different temperatures, and its ability to withstand the changing stress levels created by fermenting molasses.

In addition, Russell, along with Choate’s other expert witnesses—professor A. H. Gill of MIT’s chemical department and state police chemist Walter Wedger—testified that they had conducted tests, both at MIT and at USIA facilities in Baltimore, using a smaller replica of the Commercial Street tank. At MIT, they had filled the thirty-foot model tank with water; in Baltimore, they had used molasses. The blast ripped a hole in the side of the tank and damaged the steel walls in a fashion similar to the way the actual steel plates had been damaged after the real tank collapsed.

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.

Josephat C. Blain fidgeted on the witness stand, a nervous clerk who worked in the Boston Building Department, and whose boss approved the plans for the foundation of the molasses tank that Hammond Iron Works had submitted in October 1915. Because the tank was considered a “receptacle” and not a “building,” Hammond was not required to seek a separate permit nor include the certification of an engineer to build the fifty-foot steel tank itself. However, Blain pointed out, Hammond did submit specifications for the tank as part of its foundation permit.

Under Damon Hall’s questioning, Blain confirmed that the plans called for specific thickness of each of the seven plates that Hammond used to construct the tank—ring one was to be .687 inches thick, ring two was .625 inches thick, all the way to ring seven at the top of the tank, where the plans stated that the ring measured .312 inches in thickness. It was according to these specifications that the city issued the permit for the foundation and the tank.

Hall then read in open court Hammond’s answers to questions regarding the thickness of the walls of the tank. Hammond’s sworn statement showed that the thickness of every plate was less than what was called for in the plans. For example, the plans showed ring one—the bottom plate—would be .687 inches thick, but Hammond delivered a plate that was .667 inches thick. Plans called for the top plate, ring seven, to be .312 inches thick; Hammond delivered a steel plate that was .284 inches thick.

Hall said: “In every single one of those rings, this reputable Hammond Iron Works [delivered steel plates] that were less than the specifications called for … they were like all other steel manufacturers in the country, hurrying to fill war orders, and in every instance, they furnished steel less than the specs called for.”

USIA lawyer Charles Choate claimed that the differences were not large enough to be a factor, and that there was a “recognized custom of tolerance” in accordance with guidelines set forth by the American Society for Testing Materials. “No inspector would be warranted in rejecting a plate if it came within the above-mentioned tolerances,” Choate argued.

Hall scoffed: “Your Honor, how long would an argument of that kind last before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court? If a street car operator says, ‘I ordered axles that were sufficient to carry my car and not break, but there is a rule among car builders that they can furnish something less than I ordered and I accepted the axles under this rule. True, they are not what I ordered, and true, they are too light, but that is a rule that carbuilders follow.’ How long would the Supreme Court take to consider a defense of that kind? That is what this whole tolerance question comes down to.”

Hall had shown that the walls of the tank were up to 10 percent thinner, and thus, by definition, weaker, and less able to withstand pressure, than Hammond Iron Works had stated in the plans it had filed with the Boston Building Department.

Or put another way, the steel manufacturer had lied to the city.

Charles Choate continued to plead that the difference in thickness was so small that there would be no discernible difference in strength, and perhaps technically, he was correct. But in the battle for credibility, Hall had scored another victory.

Hall then called his “average” witnesses, who testified to the actual condition of the tank, the natural result, as Hall framed his questions, of a giant steel structure that was rushed to completion and built below specifications. The North End waterfront tank was flawed from the beginning, the plaintiffs argued, and remained flawed for the entire time it stood.

First, Frances Brown, a clerk for the Bay State Railway at the time of the flood, whose second-story office window was right across from the tank, said she noticed “several times, that molasses flowed down the sides of the tank … at the time when the molasses boat would come in, around that time, before or after, I would notice it oozing out,” Brown said. “I would notice it and call it to the attention of the girls [in the office]; in fact, we all noticed it. Several times, I saw it on the ground.”

William Foster, a marine engineer on fireboat 31, concurred, asserting: “The tank always leaked after it was put up. I noticed some of the vertical seams; the bottom ones leaked pretty badly. From the top, you could also see the molasses dripping out and running down the sides of the tank.” And then, Foster’s unmistakable implication that USIA had attempted to literally cover up the leaking problem: “The tank kept leaking right up to the time of the collapse, but you could not notice it so much at the last, because they repainted the tank … it was kind of a dark reddish brown and you couldn’t see the molasses as clearly.”

Philip Lydon, a stevedore for the Revere Sugar Refinery who worked at the North End Paving Yard from 1916 to 1918, said when molasses ships pulled into port, he and several other men would go to the tank and watch. Before a fence was erected around the tank, prior to America’s entrance into the war, Lydon said he leaned against the tank frequently while crews pumped molasses into the steel structure. “We could feel it, the vibration, bulging in and out,” Lydon said. “There was always a big leak, too, near the junction of the second and third plates … molasses ran down the side of the tank, enough for the children in the neighborhood to be there every day to get a dose of it. They would be there from early morning till late at night.”

While Charles Choate chided Lydon for “leaning” against the tank during working hours (“I have seen workmen do that when they were working for the city, but I didn’t know they had to have a tank to hold them up.”), he couldn’t shake Lydon’s testimony about the leaks. Nor did he endear himself to the witness with the snide comment about slacking: “The only time I used to go there [to the tank] was at meal hours,” Lydon shot back.

Hall’s next witness, paving yard night watchman Henry Minard, corroborated those who came before him. “I noticed that all summer before the accident, it leaked,” Minard said of the tank. “I noticed that boys used to come down there with small cans and hold them under the seams … more on a hot day than on a cool day.”

On cross-examination, Choate succeeded in getting Minard to acknowledge that, occasionally, “bums looking for a place to sleep” would enter the waterfront area through a small gate “that was never locked, on account of the firehouse being down there … but if I saw them, I would throw them out.” Minard also admitted that others “who didn’t belong” were often in the waterfront area, but Choate’s focus on possible “evilly disposed persons” did not disguise the fact that he chose not to address the leaking issue in his cross.

Hall’s next two witnesses went beyond the leaks in their description of the tank. Charles Caffrey, a stableman at the paving yard when the accident occurred, confirmed that the leaks were constant and that children “used sticks and cans to get molasses.” But he also said he “frequently” heard sounds from within the tank, “sounds like thunder, like rumbling … I heard it most any time I was near the tank.” Unfortunately for Choate and USIA, under cross-examination, Caffrey went further:

Choate: Didn’t you think the noise could be the sound of freight cars, or street cars, or the elevated trains?

Caffrey: Well, no, not exactly. It was more of a roll, like thunder.

Choate: When you first heard it, did you think it was a thunderstorm?

Caffrey: I didn’t, because I knew what it was.

Choate: What was it?

Caffrey: It was something inside of the molasses tank, bubbling and rolling, something you could hear roll heavily. I think the molasses must have been boiling, or doing something.

Choate: You think it was the boiling of the molasses that made a roar like thunder?

Caffrey: Yes.

Damon Hall, who must have been gleeful about Caffrey uttering the phrase “boiling molasses” during Choate’s cross, finished his string of “disinterested” witnesses by calling firefighter Stephen O’Brien to the stand. O’Brien, a twenty-year veteran of the Boston Fire Department, had worked at the Engine 31 fireboat as a marine engineer from 1911 until the day of the disaster, though he was not on duty on January 15, 1919.

But O’Brien was at the waterfront many days during Hammond’s construction of the tank, and his engineering curiosity drew him frequently to the work site. It was his observations about the nature of the construction that Hall focused on during questioning:

Hall: Tell us, Mr. O’Brien, how you saw them putting in the rivets, and what you saw them do before they put the rivets into the plates.

O’Brien: I saw them drift two holes in, holes that didn’t match up.

Hall: What do you mean by “drift”?

O’Brien: Well, the two holes would come about an eighth of an inch from being fair, from matching up. So they put what we call a drift pin in—a steel instrument about ten or fifteen inches long, tapered at the end to the size of the hole—and gave it two or three cracks with a sledge hammer. Then they pull out the drift pin and put the rivets in.

Hall: Well, how many times have you seen this, when one hole didn’t match up with the second hole?

O’Brien: I couldn’t tell just how many times. They worked day and night.

Charles Choate attempted unsuccessfully to shake Hall’s witness, growing frustrated with O’Brien’s insistence that he could see the misaligned plate-holes even from a distance. “You have got very good eyesight, haven’t you?” Choate asked.

“Well, I never wore glasses,” O’Brien said.

“Perhaps you’d better,” Choate snapped, and dismissed O’Brien.

Damon Hall could not have asked for a better performance from his “no name” witnesses. Each of them had been articulate, unwavering in their testimony, and most importantly, credible.

With the foundation established, Hall called Isaac Gonzales, and the two caulkers, Patrick Kenneally and John Urquhart, to strengthen his case about the tank’s substandard construction. Kenneally and Urquhart described how they tried to stem the sheer number of leaks. Gonzales told of the scale-flakes from the tank’s inside walls raining down on him, his unsuccessful attempts to convince Jell that the tank was in danger of falling, and his own observations of the leaks. “It leaked enough to make a pool, about a pail of molasses in twenty-four hours,” Gonzales testified. “The leaks were principally in the horizontal seams but in the vertical ones, too. I would spread enough sand to keep the molasses from flowing onto the railcar tracks. There was no place that I could say it was not leaking.”

After establishing for Ogden the physical condition of the tank, Hall called as witnesses five men who described themselves as explosives experts. They were sailors stationed on ships in Boston Harbor when the tank collapsed. All had served as ordnance machinists and detonation workers during the war; they were men who, like Hugh Ogden, had seen combat in Europe and were all too familiar with the sound of a shell screaming toward the ground and the pounding, deafening blast afterward. They testified that when the tank collapsed they heard rumbling sounds like thunder, or tearing sounds like rending wood, or sounds like a building collapsing.

But each of these dynamite and TNT experts were adamant that the sound they heard was nothing like the thunder produced by a high explosive.

None of the experiments USIA conducted to prove that a bomb had destroyed the tank, none of the professors and academicians who testified about the angle of the blast in the replica tank, could match the simple veracity of these combat-tested men who were a few feet from the tank when it collapsed.

USIA’s anarchist defense, built on testimony from paid experts—its theory, as Hall disdainfully labeled it—thus far had been shredded by solid testimony from average citizens who knew what they saw and described it in no uncertain words. It wasn’t over yet, but USIA was reeling; the plaintiffs needed just one knockout punch to end the fight. Damon Hall knew this and so did Charles Choate.

It was why Hall wanted nothing more than to question Arthur P. Jell, and Choate wanted just as badly to keep USIA’s assistant treasurer off the stand.

March 4, 1921, Washington, D.C.

When Republican Warren G. Harding rode in a Packard Twin Six from the White House to the Capitol on the morning of March 4, 1921, he became the first president to arrive at his inauguration in an automobile instead of a horse-drawn carriage. This symbolized both the dramatic political change that had taken place in the country with Harding’s election, and the beginning of a new era of innovation, commerce, and prosperity in America, led by Big Business.

Proving the pundits correct, Harding and his vice-presidential running mate, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, had swept into office in November, burying their Democratic opponent, Ohio Governor James M. Cox. Harding collected 404 electoral votes and won thirty-seven states, compared with Cox’s 127 electoral votes and eleven states. The popular vote margin was even more impressive—61 percent to 35 percent (Socialist Eugene V. Debs garnered 3 percent of the popular vote).

Moreover, Harding’s coattails were long and their fabric sturdy. Republican congressmen and senators were elected across the country, and the GOP piled up a 150-vote majority in the House and a twenty-two-vote majority in the Senate. “The Republican wave, still rising, has invaded rock-ribbed Southern and border States …” the Boston Globe reported. “It’s an avalanche to Harding.” The Boston Herald said the election returns “accentuate the stupendous overturn in government.” Women, voting nationwide for the first time following the passage of the 19th amendment in August 1920, cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Harding, who was elected on his fifty-fifth birthday.

In Massachusetts, the Harding victory was even more striking, thanks in part to the influence of the popular Coolidge, who won the admiration of voters for his leadership during the Boston police strike. Cox, the Democrat, carried only two small towns in the Bay State. Nearly 90 percent of Massachusetts’ voters went to the polls, a full third of them women, and political experts estimated that about three-quarters of women voted for the Republican ticket. More than sixty thousand women cast ballots in the city of Boston alone, and Harding and Coolidge carried the capital city by a plurality of thirty thousand votes, the first time Boston had given a Republican a plurality since William McKinley in 1896.

The stunning GOP victory was seen nationwide as a repudiation of Woodrow Wilson’s policies and politics—his dogged attempts to draw the United States into a League of Nations and his unfriendliness toward Big Business. So devastating was Wilson’s defeat that fiery Democrat William Jennings Bryan only half-jokingly called for a constitutional maneuver that would allow Wilson to resign in December 1920 and Harding to assume the presidency three months before the scheduled inauguration.

Harding recognized the mandate the country had given him and used words and symbols on inauguration day to usher in the new era. Under a brilliant sky, a Marine Band, “gay in scarlet coats and bright blue trousers,” sat in front of the inaugural kiosk, while the steps of the Capitol were guarded with color guards of “regulars and sailors …” noted the New York Times. “Viewed from an upper window of the Capitol … (were) the reds, greens, and browns of women’s hats,” women whose participation in the inaugural, for the first time in American history, was more than ceremonial, and whom Harding rewarded for their support by providing hundreds with prime seating locations at the inaugural.

During his thirty-seven-minute inaugural address, Harding, the country’s twenty-ninth president, spoke first on the topic closest to the hearts of most Americans: the sovereignty of the United States. He justified the country’s decision not to participate in the League of Nations that had become so closely associated with his predecessor, and which finally came into being without U.S. support on January 20, 1920. “We recognize the new order in the world, with the closer contacts which progress has wrought. We crave friendship and harbor no hate,” Harding said. “But America, our America … can be a party to no permanent military alliance. It can enter into no political commitments, nor assume any economic obligations which will subject our decisions to any other than our own authority.”

But it was Harding’s secondary inaugural theme that was the subject of greater interest to America’s business leaders: the need to fuel the country’s economic progress by freeing Big Business from the regulatory shackles that Wilson and Congress had imposed during the war. The message played like sweet music in boardrooms and factories across America—to the emerging automobile, aviation, and rubber magnates; to the burgeoning steel, chemical, and construction industries; to the Wall Street financiers and investment bankers; and indeed, to industrial corporations like United States Industrial Alcohol. Though many of these companies, USIA included, had benefited enormously from war-related contracts, they were now hobbled by excessive regulations in a peacetime economy.

Harding outlined the remedy: “I speak for administrative efficiency, for lightened tax burdens, for sound commercial practices, for adequate credit facilities, for the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business, for an end to Government’s experiment in business, and for more efficient business in Government administration.”

Harding had called for freeing America from international entanglements that could weaken her and freeing American business from regulations that he believed could weaken the economy. As if to symbolize this new freedom, his first executive order was to reopen the gates to the White House grounds to the general public for the first time since Wilson had ordered them shut when the United States had entered the war on April 6, 1917. The New York Times reported: “Crowds poured through all the entrances like water through a broken dam … The crowds streamed across the lawns from all four sides and some pressed their faces against the White House windows.” Noted the Boston Herald: “Immediately after the gates swung open, the crowd … thronged in … [then] news of the issuance of the order spread about the city and inaugural visitors and Washingtonians added a visit to the White House ground to the list of history-making events they had witnessed during the day.”

Harding’s hope for a richer, stronger America would be dampened briefly by a severe, though short, depression in the latter part of 1921 and early 1922. But the vision of his inaugural was realized shortly thereafter when the economy recovered and began an eight-year era of prosperity that would become known as the Roaring Twenties. Harding, his administration wracked by scandal, his life cut short while in office by high blood pressure and heart disease, received little credit for the boom; much of that went to Calvin Coolidge, who assumed the presidency in 1923 upon Harding’s death, and was elected in his own right in 1924.

Still, Harding’s 1921 inaugural marked the beginning of a new stage in America’s economic growth. Men like Henry Ford and Alfred F. Sloan of General Motors, and Harvey Firestone and Frank M. Seiberling of Goodyear Rubber, helped the country’s auto production jump from 1.5 million cars in 1919 to nearly 5 million in 1929, and spawned the first “auto sections” in American newspapers. America built roads, schools, and factories. Electrification of those factories and modern assembly-line methods created a boom in manufacturing production. Capital became plentiful as banks loosened the reins on credit to keep up with the growth. The stock market shot up.

New money in the marketplace, coupled with a white-hot economy, spurred innovation and consumer spending. Wages of working Americans grew, and the onset of installment buying allowed them to purchase more for their families. The 1920s marked a consumer goods revolution—electric toasters, irons, phonographs, radios, plumbing fixtures, and automobiles. While immigrants and black Americans still faced discrimination and tough economic prospects, most of the country prospered.

In November 1920, KDKA in Pittsburgh would begin service, marking the birth of regular American radio broadcasting. Two years later, there would be five hundred stations on the air. The movie business also grew during the 1920s, as the American public flocked to theaters to see Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin.

American business was at the pinnacle of its influence. About two hundred corporations controlled more than 20 percent of the nation’s wealth. The large corporations thrived, both financially and in the public’s eyes; companies like International Harvester, H. J. Heinz, Singer Sewing, Ford, General Motors, U.S. Steel, AT&T, and du Pont saw themselves not only as leaders in their industries, not only as job-creation machines, but as leading institutions in society. As wages grew and labor opportunities abounded in the 1920s, Big Business saw itself as a benefactor that bestowed both financial rewards and a sense of self-worth to those whom it employed. By developing new, often revolutionary products, by moving the country forward, Big Business believed it was doing more than making money; it was doing something virtuous. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple—the man who works there worships there,” Calvin Coolidge said.

It is hard to overestimate the symbolic impact of Warren Harding’s inauguration, the overwhelming sense of excitement and promise it created among America’s entrepreneurial and corporate elite. The power and influence of Big Business had been curtailed during Wilson’s eight-year tenure, profitable war years notwithstanding; corporate leaders believed that a Republican administration offered virtually limitless prospects, new hope at the start of a new decade.

USIA and its lead attorney, Charles Choate, must have felt some of that hope. Choate’s case had absorbed a series of body blows by Damon Hall’s relentless procession of witnesses; perhaps the country’s changing mood toward business, exemplified by Harding’s resounding victory, would induce Hugh Ogden to look more favorably on USIA’s version of events.

Many of Boston’s finest private men’s clubs, several of which Ogden belonged to, had celebrated the GOP victory in November, most holding receptions for former governor Calvin Coolidge for becoming vice president-elect. Choate believed that Coolidge and Harding, without doubt, were Ogden’s kind of men. If the new president, elected by an electoral and popular landslide, was calling for the “omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business,” then certainly Ogden would have to consider whether a decision against USIA fell into the category of “unnecessary interference.” Certainly, he would have to think long and hard about the ramifications of such a decision. Would it stifle the expansion of plants and factories if they were required to attain unattainable levels of safety? Would it introduce a whole new layer of government regulations and restrictions even while a popular new president had clearly called for the opposite?

For the first time in years, warm winds, favorable to Big Business, were now blowing steadily from Washington. Warren G. Harding’s inauguration, and all that it bespoke, must have buoyed Charles Choate’s spirits and instilled cautious optimism in the defense. How long that optimism would prevail would depend on how well Arthur P. Jell stood up to questioning three weeks hence in New York City.

Hugh Ogden’s feelings about President Harding’s nomination are not part of the historical record, but Ogden’s writings and speeches indicate strongly that he would have cast a wary eye toward America’s economic prosperity, lest it cloud her vision on bedrock issues of fairness and justice for all citizens.

In a Memorial Day speech in the near future, Ogden would observe: “We have prospered. We have sold goods at high prices. We have accumulated the largest stock of gold any nation ever possessed, but have we done anymore than that? Have we in our blindness gained the whole world and lost our own soul? It was not to ensure material prosperity that our soldiers fought and died … that the relations of capital and labor might be still further embittered … We must administer our government upon the broadest and most humanitarian lines so that each citizen shall receive his full inheritance in good roads, good schools, adequate opportunities for higher education, hospital facilities, libraries … and other institutions that are a public charge for the public good.”

Ogden most likely voted for Warren Harding and was no doubt generally inclined to agree with the president’s attitudes about government and big business. But the auditor’s strength of character, forged on the battlefields of France, and his sense of fair play, made it unlikely that Charles Choate would get his wish, unlikely that Ogden would be influenced by the prevailing economic prosperity or long-term ramifications. Hugh Ogden would consider and decide the molasses case on its merits alone.

Manhattan, Friday, March 25, 1921

The temperature hovered around the mid-80s, the highest ever in Manhattan for the end of March, when Damon Hall, Charles Choate, Henry F. Dolan, and a court stenographer arrived at the elegant Hotel Belmont to question Jell.

Damon Hall was miffed that he had to travel to New York at all. When the plaintiffs had added Jell to the witness list, Choate had tried desperately to prevent the USIA executive from taking the stand by arguing to the Superior Court that Jell’s testimony was not directly relevant to the case. The court disagreed and ordered Choate to make Jell available to Hall and the plaintiffs. Choate then pleaded with the court not to compel Jell to testify before Ogden, that traveling from New York to Boston would be an “immense inconvenience” for Jell, and requested instead that Jell be deposed by attorneys from both sides in New York City. The judge agreed, over Hall’s vociferous objections; Hall wanted Ogden to be able to look Jell directly in the eye, to watch his comportment under tough questioning.

Hall was not surprised that Choate had chosen the opulent Hotel Belmont as a way to establish Jell’s importance and stamp USIA’s corporate imprimatur on the proceedings. Far from the neutral surroundings of Hugh Ogden’s modest Boston courtroom, the Belmont dripped with haughty pretension. Built at the corner of 42nd Street and Park Avenue in 1906, the twenty-story building, shaped like a tall wedge of cheese, boasted a spacious two-story lobby, grand staircases, floors and walls treated in red marble, mirrored elevator doors, and a dining room and massive sitting room with richly carpeted floors, and great red columns supporting arched ceilings. “New York has added another splendid hostelry to its already rich store,” one writer noted when the hotel opened fifteen years earlier. “To this monster hotel, one might aptly apply the expression for large New York enterprises: A city in itself.”

Hall believed Choate had chosen the Belmont to gain an edge, perhaps as a means to intimidate, but more likely with the hope that the civility and elegance of the hotel would lessen the tenacity of Hall’s questioning. Hall knew the tactic well; it was based on the same theory that said it was perfectly acceptable to criticize a government or corporate leader in private conversation, but impolite to confront him on the same topic face to face. Hall thought Choate was operating on a simple premise: plush surroundings equaled cushy questions.

But for Hall, who was not easily awed amidst resplendence, the trip to New York and the Belmont had just the opposite effect. He was angry at Choate for trying to prevent Jell from testifying in the first place, angrier still that Choate had protested Jell’s traveling to Boston to appear before Ogden. To him, that tactic had violated the basic premise of fairness. He viewed Choate as a worthy adversary and, while they were not friends, he had respected the defense counsel for his integrity and love for the law; Choate’s successful maneuvering to shelter Jell from Ogden’s scrutiny twisted the rules of law in a way Hall found distasteful and disappointing.

Since Ogden would not get to see Jell, it meant Hall’s direct examination needed to be more pointed than ever. Jell’s answers needed to jump from the page when Ogden read the deposition transcript.

The Belmont’s cut-glass chandeliers and frescoed walls notwithstanding, Damon Hall planned to tear into Arthur P. Jell like he was in a street fight.

Hall wasted little time with preliminaries. He quickly established that the forty-two-year-old Jell had spent his entire professional career as a financial administrator, that he had no technical or engineering training, and that he could not read building plans or specifications.

Jell then acknowledged that he had ordered Hammond Iron Works to construct the steel plates for the tank’s walls with a “factor of safety” of 3, which led Hall to this line of questioning:

Hall: Was the factor of safety of 3 that you determined the result of any investigation or advice from technically trained engineers, builders, or architects?

Jell: No.

Hall: No?

Jell: No.

Hall: Did you, prior to making that recommendation of a factor of safety of 3, make any investigation whatever as to the factor of safety which the ordinary engineering practice called for?

Jell: No.

Hall: Did you consult anyone before making that suggestion as to a factor of safety of 3.

Jell: I don’t remember having done so.

Hall: Is it fair to say, then, that you arrived at that in your own mind?

Jell: Not entirely. I had been told in the past by tank manufacturers that they built tanks with a factor of safety of 2. So I figured 3 would be sufficient.

Hall: Do you know what manufacturers told you that?

Jell: I do not.

Hall: Or the size of the tanks to which they referred?

Jell: I do not.

For Hall, it was not enough to show that Jell’s “factor of safety” specification was based on no credible knowledge or advice. It was also important that he get Jell to admit what had happened when Hammond Iron Works delivered plans and drawings based on those specifications:

Hall: When Mr. Shellhammer [of Hammond Iron Works] showed you the plans in January of 1915, did you have any talk with him about the factor of safety in the specifications?

Jell: I cannot remember.

Hall: Do you remember that you did?

Jell: No, I do not.

Hall: With such experience as you had, were you able, by looking at the plans and specifications, to determine from them what factor of safety had been provided in them?

Jell: No.

Hall: Did you submit the plans or specifications to any architect or engineer?

Jell: No.

Hall: Did you submit them to the New York office of U.S. Industrial Alcohol? Did you show them to any officer of USIA?

Jell: No.

Hall: Did anyone ask to see them, to inspect them?

Jell: No.

Hall: I want to ask one more time, before I go on with the next line of inquiry, whether … the factor of safety as determined upon was the result of any investigation or advice from technically trained engineers, builders, or architects?

Jell: No.

Hall: Your answer is “no”?

Jell: No.

And then, once Hammond had finished the steel plates and delivered them:

Hall: Upon the delivery of the metal for this tank in Boston, did you have any engineer or builder examine the material [to ensure it conformed to] specifications?

Jell: No.

Hall: Or any metallurgist?

Jell: No.

Hall: Did you seek the advice or consult with any person outside of the employees of Hammond Iron Works, as to the quality and fitness of the steel which was delivered, or the method of construction?

Jell: No.

Hall: Did you at any time have or ask for any test to be made of the steel being fabricated on your behalf?

Jell: No.

Jell then acknowledged that he had been frustrated by delays as he attempted to secure the waterfront site for the tank from Boston Elevated, and that the delay was “causing us embarrassment … without a tank of our own, we were compelled to purchase from a dealer in molasses, who charged us a higher price than we could have it delivered at our own tank.” Later, after the steel arrived and the sale of the property had been completed, Jell testified that he ordered Hammond to hire additional crews to finish the work before the Miliero arrived on December 31, 1915. Work continued right up until the day the molasses ship steamed into Boston Harbor.

Hall: Did you at any time after the tank was erected, and before the steamer arrived, have any investigation made of the tank by any architect, engineer, or man who was familiar with steel construction, as to the sufficiency of the tank as erected?

Jell: No.

Hall: Referring to the contract for the erection of the tank, do you recall that it provided for a water test after the tank was created? That the tank be filled with water to test for leaks?

Jell: Yes.

Hall: Was any water test made of the tank—except by putting in six inches of water, as you have already testified—before it was put into service?

Jell: No.

Hall: Why not?

Jell: Well, for one reason, there was not time … It would have been impossible to empty the water again before the arrival of the steamer. It would have been impossible to fill the tank. There was not a supply of water at that point sufficient to fill the tank within a reasonable time. We had only a very small water connection and it would have taken many days, possibly have run into weeks, to have filled the tank with water.

Hall: Do you mean by that, or do you not, that if you had made that water test, it would have delayed the unloading of the steamer?

Jell: Yes.

Hall: That is what you mean?

Jell: Yes, sir.

Hall: Did you investigate to see whether there were water mains on Commercial Street which would have afforded ample quantities of water to fill it in much less than weeks?

Jell: I did not.

Relentless, Hall concluded this line of testimony, no doubt secretly cheering Jell’s response:

Hall: Any other reasons why the water test was not made?

Jell: It was considered an unnecessary expense.

Hall: By whom was it considered an unnecessary expense?

Jell: By me.

Hall then introduced into evidence Jell’s letter to Hammond thanking them for “rushing” the tank’s construction, and induced Jell to admit that Gonzales had reported leaks in the tank, though Jell thought his employee was exaggerating or “misinformed.” But later, Jell appeared to contradict himself when he said he had ordered the tank caulked twice and repainted in response to Gonzales’s concerns.

The plaintiffs’ counsel then finished his direct questioning of the USIA assistant treasurer:

Hall: Well, now, Mr. Jell, at any time before December 31, 1915 [when the tank was completed], and the date when this catastrophe occurred, did you have any architect or engineer, or any person familiar with steel construction, inspect this tank?

Jell: No.

Hall: Do you know of any such inspection having been made by any such persons?

Jell: I do not.

Hall: Do you know of any engineer employed by the company, or any architect, or expert in steel construction employed by USIA, of your own knowledge, who ever visited the tank prior to the disaster?

Jell: Not to my knowledge.

After a short break in the sweltering meeting room, Charles Choate tried to salvage something for the defense in his cross-examination. Under his friendly questioning, Jell pointed out that USIA had larger molasses tanks in Baltimore that had never had problems (one holding 3 million gallons), and that he trusted Hammond Iron Works because they were a reputable steel manufacturer. When Hammond did not object to Jell’s “factor of safety” specification, Jell assumed that his number was sufficient and that Hammond would deliver steel plates with the proper factor of safety. As for testing the tank, Jell said it was for “leaks only” and, in response to Choate’s question added, “it hasn’t anything to do with the strength of the tank.”

Choate focused more on the anarchist activity in the area, the police presence during the war, and the report from Gonzales that a caller had threatened to destroy the tank.

Choate: You did regard his report and this threat as sufficient importance to ask for special protection [guards]?

Jell: Yes.

Choate: And you got it?

Jell: Yes.

On redirect, however, Hall questioned how Jell could “disbelieve” Gonzales’s numerous reports about the tank’s leaks, but conclude that his comments about the telephone threat were credible enough to ask for extra police protection on the waterfront. “You said you paid no attention to what Gonzales said to you, except in the instance of the police report [due to the phone threat], because you didn’t consider him a responsible person,” Hall said. “Do you remember saying that?” Jell replied: “Yes.”

And then, Hall revisited Jell’s claim that the water test on the tank would be for leaks only, not to determine the tank’s strength to withstand weight or pressure:

Hall: Did it occur to you, did you have any idea, that the (water test) might give some idea as to the strength of the tank, as well as the leaks?

Jell: No. None whatever.

Hall: That didn’t occur to you?

Jell: No, sir.

Hall: One final time, Mr. Jell. Did you ever ascertain, prior to the erection of the Commercial Street tank, by submitting those Hammond plans to anybody on the face of the Earth, whether they called for a safety factor of 3?

Jell: I did not.

Finally, Hall addressed Jell’s assertion that he relied on Hammond Iron Works’ experience and expertise to produce steel plates sufficient to hold 2.3 million gallons of molasses in a tank that stood fifty feet high and ninety feet in diameter.

Hall: Did you have any training or experience that enabled you to determine whether they [Hammond] were skillful and competent people or not?

Jell: I did not.

Hall: And … did you have any knowledge or experience whatever that enabled you to tell whether the construction work was done satisfactorily, or whether the tank was strong?

Jell: I considered the tank satisfactory for our purpose.

Hall: If you will just answer the question … no technical experience of any kind?

Jell: No. None.

Sitting in the Hotel Belmont in New York City, on March 25, 1921, seven months into the molasses hearings, USIA attorney Charles Choate had no way of knowing that there would be two and a half years and thousands of pages of testimony ahead in this monstrous case. He was not clairvoyant, after all.

But he was intelligent and perceptive, and he knew that it would be nearly impossible for the defense to recover from Jell’s stunningly damaging deposition—his blatant admissions that no qualified person oversaw the development of the tank’s plans or its construction, and worse, that safety had been compromised so egregiously for the sake of time and money.

With his New York drubbing of Arthur P. Jell, Damon Hall had succeeded in getting two critical pieces of testimony on the record. Earlier, he had shown that Hammond Iron Works had delivered steel plates that were 10 percent thinner than its own plans had stated. Now, Jell had acknowledged that he had relied on Hammond’s reputation only to assume that the tank would be safe. By definition, when Hammond had lied to USIA and the City of Boston and delivered substandard steel, its reputation had been sullied.

Hall had also gotten Jell to admit that he had not tested the tank before it was filled with molasses, not for any sound scientific or engineering reason, but simply to avoid expense and save time.

Now he needed to lock one more piece into place. The fact that the plates were too thin, and that Jell had not ordered the water test, provided enough circumstantial evidence for Ogden to conclude that the tank was structurally unsound from the beginning; but these facts, in and of themselves, were not hard evidence. Hall needed to introduce rock-solid evidence that the tank was poorly constructed, that it was lucky to have stood at all.

For that, he needed the report prepared two years earlier by MIT Professor C.M. Spofford on behalf of the Boston Elevated Company.

Professor Spofford’s report, the result of tests he conducted on pieces of the tank just a few weeks after the collapse at MIT laboratories, received little public attention until Damon Hall introduced it into evidence. Hall believed that the entire Spofford report would carry far more weight than the testimony of other expert witnesses, since one of Spofford’s important observations in 1919 had later been corroborated by independent court testimony: The MIT expert had stated in writing shortly after the accident that the tank’s steel plates were thinner than the plans had called for, “and were overstrained by the static pressure of the molasses.”

This fact alone enhanced the credibility of the entire Spofford report. If he was correct about the thickness of the plates, why would there be any reason to doubt his other conclusions?

In addition to his observations about the plates, Spofford found that the tank had been secured with an “insufficient number” of rivets. As a result, the steel shell was unable to withstand a capacity load of molasses, and the joints simply gave way.

“The tension in these plates should not have exceeded 16,000 pounds per square inch,” Spofford wrote, “and a stress as great as 18,000 pounds per square inch is as high as should have been permitted under any circumstances.” On the day the tank ruptured, the 2.3 million gallons of molasses, 44 percent heavier than water, weighed 26 million pounds and exerted pressure on the tank’s walls of 31,000 pounds per square inch, “a figure nearly double that which should have been allowed,” Spofford concluded. Therefore, “the factor of safety is but 1.8, while ordinary practice would have called for from 3 to 4.”

Damon Hall now had entered into the record a credible expert’s opinion that the tank’s factor of safety came nowhere near the “3” level Arthur Jell said he had ordered from Hammond Iron Works. Jell said he declined to ask any engineer to inspect the steel plates upon their arrival, and ordered no calculations as to the weight of the molasses and the pressure it exerted on the tank’s walls. By definition, this meant that USIA erected the fifty-foot tank on the outskirts of Boston’s most congested neighborhood with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of its strength or its capability to withstand pressure from the molasses within.

“In my judgment, the tank was improperly designed, and its failure was due entirely to structural weakness,” Spofford concluded. “The formation of gases in the molasses might have increased the head of the molasses somewhat … [but] the stresses due to the static pressure of the molasses alone were so great that the whole structure was in a dangerous condition …”

With Spofford’s credibility and his explicit conclusions, Hall believed that the plaintiffs had offered irrefutable proof of USIA’s negligence.

Thursday, July 14, 1921

Just before 8 P.M., the twelve members of the jury sitting in Dedham, Massachusetts, indicated to Judge Webster Thayer that they were ready to deliver their verdict in the case of the two anarchists charged with murder, Sacco and Vanzetti.

In the six weeks that they had heard evidence in the case of the South Braintree killings, they had developed a sense of camaraderie that would bind them together for the rest of their lives. Today, they would deliver a verdict that would resound across the world.

“Guilty of murder in the first degree,” croaked the jury foreman when Thayer asked him for the verdict on, first, Sacco, and then, Vanzetti.

When he heard the words, Sacco shouted out: Sono innocente! Sono innocente! They kill innocent men! Don’t forget. Two innocent men they kill!” Vanzetti said nothing as he was led away by police officers.

The conviction of the two Italian immigrant anarchists, which could carry a death sentence, would spark a six-year global cause celebre that would include mass demonstrations, letter-writing campaigns, political pleas, and legal appeals that would fill law libraries. Were Sacco and Vanzetti the deceitful, stone-cold killers the prosecution described, who were willing to resort to any crime to advance their anarchist cause? Or were they two innocent men whose immigrant status and anarchist activities made them easy targets for authorities looking to sate the passions of an inflamed public? Or was one guilty and the other innocent?

Scholars and ordinary researchers alike would study and debate the case for years. It would be the subject of legal and academic symposia, debates between conservatives and liberals, book fodder for scores of prominent authors.

Today, however, Charles Choate saw the Sacco and Vanzetti convictions as further confirmation that the public still feared anarchists and believed them capable of deadly violence. That was a glimmer of good news for USIA, which Damon Hall had been pummeling for months.

Choate must have believed that the impact of the jury’s decision in Dedham could give him a fighting chance, that it breathed a renewed sliver of plausibility into USIA’s case, which now hung by the slimmest of threads in Hugh W. Ogden’s courtroom.

July, 1921–July, 1923

As the liability portion of the molasses hearings drew to a conclusion, Hugh Ogden gathered the attorneys from both sides together to announce that he would hear the individual cases on damages forthwith, prior to issuing any decision on liability. Charles Choate argued that the damage testimony itself could further prejudice Ogden against USIA, thereby affecting his liability decision. Why not reach a verdict on liability before deciding on damages? If USIA were absolved from culpability, would not the damages portion of the hearings be rendered unnecessary?

Ogden held firm, saying he would render no decision until he had heard all the evidence in the case, including the damage arguments. While he never stated it, Ogden’s decision to move forward on damages had to be a signal to both sides that he believed USIA bore at least partial responsibility for the molasses disaster.

For the next two years, Damon Hall called on wives who had lost their husbands and mothers who had seen their sons die in the most horrific way possible, their broken bodies wracked with pain at the Haymarket Relief Station. He called on men and boys whose bones had been crushed and skulls fractured, and on breadwinners who had been unable to work since the accident.

He called on stonecutter John Barry, whose hair had turned white while he was trapped under the firehouse, and whose injuries had forced him to support ten children while performing light duty. “The pain in my back hurts all the time,” Barry said. “It’s as though my spine is breaking. I can’t straighten up; I feel like I am going to fall almost all the time. The doctor says there is no cure.”

He called on firefighter Bill Connor, who had been trapped near Barry, who had implored a fellow firefighter to kick debris away from a hole so the molasses could flow out, who heard George Layhe’s anguished cries as he succumbed to crushing injuries and smothered in the molasses. Connor tore his shoulder muscles and was placed on injured leave after rescuers pulled him out from under the collapsed firehouse.

Hall called on Martin Clougherty, former owner of the Pen and Pencil Club, whose mother died when her wooden frame house splintered into pieces after smashing into the overhead trestle, and whose brother died slowly in the insane hospital; Clougherty, who had clung to his bed-frame “raft” to stay atop the molasses. He had terrible nightmares after the accident and was bedridden for three months. “My ribs and my chest still hurt,” he told the court. “I can’t lay on my left side. All across my chest, where the big planks fell on me, anytime I get a touch of cold it just chokes me right up. Even without cold, when I lay on my back in bed at night, I feel like my wind is shutting off.” In addition, Clougherty’s dreams continued, “bad dreams, with buildings falling over me … and if I go into a subway, or if I go into a crowd, I feel like I’m being crowded and I need to fight my way out. I have a general feeling of depression all of the time while I’m awake.”

The testimony continued with the families of the dead—the Iantoscas, the Distasios, the Layhes, the Callahans, the Breens, and the Martins—each describing how they learned of their loved one’s death. Some watched it firsthand, like Giuseppe Iantosca, who witnessed Pasquale being swallowed by the molasses wave.

Charles Choate and the defense did their best to minimize the stories and the suffering, eliciting testimony from doctors who suggested that those who died from molasses asphyxiation did not “suffer” because they were killed so quickly. Defense attorneys even argued that the dead children, Maria Distasio and Pasquale Iantosca, who were collecting firewood near the tank, were “trespassers” and therefore, their families were entitled to no damage awards at all. “A company is under no obligation to make its premises safe for trespassers,” one defense attorney sniffed.

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.

August 17, 1923

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.