Epilogue

The ten-year timeline of the molasses flood story, which began in 1915 when USIA built the tank and ended with Hugh Ogden’s decision in 1925, offers more than a dramatic prism through which to view a tumultuous decade in Boston and America. The flood saga exemplified and directly influenced events that changed the region and the nation in the short term, and shaped them for years to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boston Molasses Flood — List of Deceased

(1) Ages listed are according to death certificates; these were sometimes incorrect, especially for immigrants, for whom the actual date of birth was not always known.

(2) In the language of the day, a “teamster” was, literally, a man who drove a team of horses, usually transporting a wagon full of goods.

(3) Though Damon Hall and Martin Clougherty argued strenuously that Stephen Clougherty’s death in the insane asylum was caused by the trauma he suffered in the molasses flood, Hugh Ogden disagreed and awarded no damages for Stephen’s death.

(4) No death certificate exists for James Kinneally. We do know, from testimony of his wife, Mary, that the couple had been married for thirty years at the time of his death. Together, they had nine children—only five of whom were still alive when Mary testified in Hugh Ogden’s courtroom.