FOUR 
Boston, April 1917
President Wilson’s request for a declaration of war against Germany fueled a patriotic fervor in Boston during the first week of April that sent thousands to the streets to cheer at huge rallies, or to gather on downtown corners to sing the National Anthem, eyes skyward, watching as enormous American flags were unfurled from the upper floors of the city’s tallest and most prominent buildings, snapping in the wind as they billowed down the face of each structure. Boston had begun showing its support for Wilson’s decision before his speech on April 2 when nearly two hundred thousand people thronged the Boston Common at noon in a gathering remarkable not only for its size but for the fact that it was virtually unorganized. Mayor Curley had issued a simple proclamation a few days earlier asking Bostonians to join together on the Common for a flag-raising. On this day, anticipating the magnitude of President Wilson’s speech later in the evening, people arrived from every section of the city, streaming onto the historic forty-five-acre grassy parcel from all sides, as Boston shut down during the noon hour.
“It was unorganized, nothing was prepared,” one newspaper account read. “And yet more men, women and children came to see the American flag raised … than ever came before to the Boston Common for any single event … from banks, from stores, from halls of City and State Government, they came.” Two-and-a-half centuries earlier, Bostonians had gathered on this “common land” to exercise their horses, graze their cattle, and drill their militia companies. Now they gathered to express their full-throated support of America’s entry into a European war.
Throughout the week, similar smaller rallies continued at locations around the city, as flags were raised over dozens of Boston buildings to the accompaniment of music and speeches. At a Faneuil Hall rally, Mayor Curley told fruit peddlers and meat packers that, “it isn’t necessary to talk patriotism to men who work within sight of the greatest beacon light of liberty this old world has ever known, Faneuil Hall.” He reminded the men that “the president of the United States has not asked for a declaration of war on the German people, but on the German government,” a sentiment that elicited a roar from the crowd. At another North Station ceremony, Mayor Curley praised President Wilson and predicted to a cheering crowd of about a thousand people that American blood would not have to be shed to end the war, but that the German people would rise up and overthrow their government.
Curley’s prediction notwithstanding, Boston shifted into a war mind-set rapidly during the first week of April. The Boston Globe reminded its readers that April was “a war month” for America, noting that the American Revolution, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War had all begun in April, implying that Wilson’s call for America’s entry into the current European conflict was wrapped in a cloak of historical appropriateness and destiny. In response to President Wilson’s call for a standing military 2 million strong within two years, young men flocked to recruitment centers across the city. Lines at the Tremont Street Army and Navy recruitment centers blocked the stairways to the third-floor offices and stretched out the door, and men streamed into the Marine recruiting station in nearby Scollay Square.
At the nearby Charlestown Navy Yard, more than 1,500 men applied for enlistment within three days of Wilson’s speech to Congress. “The naval officers are much pleased with the type of young men they are getting, young, growing boys, active and alert,” one newspaper reported. “However, there is an urgent need also for the slightly older, more solidly built men, and particularly for skilled men, plumbers, blacksmiths, electricians.” Each day, papers listed the “non-slackers” for the day, praising those who had enlisted.
Along with the rush to enlist came a sharp increase in the number of people applying for marriage licenses, in Boston and across the country, as couples scrambled to marry before bridegrooms-to-be shipped overseas. In Chicago, more than eight thousand applications for marriage licenses were received at City Hall within ten days of Wilson’s speech, and in Boston, applications doubled over the previous year. Many ministers around the country spread the word that they would not marry “slackers”—men either had to have enlisted or had a good reason for not doing so.
Aside from enlistments, the first week of active war preparation was a flurry of activity in Boston. The Navy closed Boston Harbor at dark, allowing no vessel in or out. Navy divers laid mines and stretched wire netting across the floor of the harbor to thwart German U-boats. Armed patrols were established along Long Wharf, Rowe’s Wharf, and Commercial Street Wharf, the latter within a few feet of the molasses tank. German merchant ships docked in harbors across the country were seized and their crews detained, including seven large ships in Boston. Nearly two hundred German crew members were shipped to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, technically as prisoners of war, though their cells—described as “large and excellent quarters”—remained unlocked, and they were allowed free movement around the island.
Meanwhile, Boston’s district attorney was warning the city against potentially violent anarchist activity, claiming that Boston was in “grave danger from disturbances by anarchistic bands who are holding nightly meetings, planning what they can do to tear down the structure of Government while the country’s eyes are fixed on danger from without.” Joseph Pelletier urged that additional guards be stationed in every bank and that manufacturing companies increase precautions. “A few hand grenades, effectively used, would put Boston in darkness for six months,” he warned. Pelletier advocated a “thorough survey” of Boston, “that we may get the names and addresses of all who are not citizens. Then we must learn what these people are doing. We must know their purpose in being in the city.”
During the next several days, between April 8 and April 10, Pelletier’s warnings appeared prophetic as a series of activities in other cities, but not Boston, were blamed on anarchists. The Capitol Police presence was increased in Washington, D.C., after the Secret Service relayed a tip that anarchists were planning to dynamite the Capitol building, a report that proved to be false. In Pittsburgh, authorities blamed anarchists for an arson fire that destroyed a portion of the Aetna Chemical Company, one of the country’s largest munitions manufacturers and a major customer of U.S. Industrial Alcohol.
And in the most tragic event, 116 workers, many of them teenage girls, perished in a massive explosion at the Eddystone Ammunition Corporation in Chester, Pennsylvania. The explosion occurred in the pellet room of the shrapnel building, where the girls worked polishing shells. Officials believed that “foreigners” working in the factory planted the bomb, taking their own lives in the explosion. “It is very difficult to have five thousand people working in a munitions factory and not have some foreigners employed,” lamented the factory manager.
Though no violent anarchist activity occurred in Boston during this time, the city, now very much on wartime alert, remained vigilant.
Cambridge, Mass., Two Weeks Later
Arthur P. Jell had taken seriously both the explosion in Pennsylvania and the Pelletier warning. Within days of each, he had hired his own guards and had them sworn in as special police, replacing the single Boston police officer who had guarded the tank on a fixed post. While the possibility of sabotage was an unpleasant thought to consider, he also had been heartened by additional news from Washington. The Council of National Defense had created a General Munitions Board to oversee munitions and equipment production for the Army and Navy, coordinate military purchases, and assist the munitions companies in acquiring raw materials for their manufacturing facilities. The General Munitions Board had enormous power, virtually Cabinet-level influence, and could also direct certain manufacturing facilities to switch from domestic to defense production if necessary.
Jell knew that this decision elevated the status of the industrial alcohol distilling business, ensured that red tape could be cut quickly if it jeopardized production or distribution activities, and virtually guaranteed USIA’s double-digit growth for as long as the war continued. He also believed that America’s entry into the war was a good chance for him to show the New York home office that the Boston tank and the Cambridge distilling plant could handle soaring production quotas.
But this morning, sitting in his tidy Cambridge office just ten days after he had hired his own guards for the Commercial Street site, Arthur Jell’s enthusiasm was waning and his irritation was increasing. The problem was Gonzales and his paranoia. USIA’s general man at the Commercial Street molasses tank stood to jeopardize Jell’s and the company’s success in the coming months if he could not be controlled.
First, there was his unauthorized visit a few days ago, complaining sanctimoniously about molasses leaking from the mammoth storage tank. Gonzales said the tank leaked from every seam every day, that workers on the dock had questioned him about it, and that the Italian neighborhood children gathered around the base of the tank each noon hour to collect molasses in their small pails. “The children also dip sticks into the pools of molasses and slurp it into their mouths; it even drips onto their clothes,” Gonzales had said. “I spread sand around the base of the tank to keep the molasses from flowing too far, but with my other duties, I can’t keep up with it.”
Gonzales then had thrust rusty steel flakes that he had collected from inside the tank into Jell’s hands, brushing the last bits from his own palms and into Jell’s as though they burned his skin. “These fall like snow into my hair and onto my clothes each time I go inside the tank,” he had said with a plea in his voice.
Jell told Gonzales there was nothing to worry about, that the tank was strong and sturdy, that some leaking was normal, especially after the large molasses shipment that the Miliero had delivered to the tank in February. He had ordered Gonzales to do a better job of running the trespassing children off of the property so they wouldn’t come back. He had not spoken angrily, though he was angry that Gonzales had traveled to Cambridge, had tracked cakes of mud from his work boots onto Jell’s office carpet, and had lectured Jell on the construction of molasses tanks, as though Gonzales were some sort of engineering expert rather than a manual laborer whose job it was to take direction from his supervisor each day.
The visit had been intrusive enough, but then Gonzales had revealed that he had been sleeping at the tank for several months, bedding down in the pump-pit shack. “I’m afraid the tank is not safe, and if it should start to fall, I can sound a warning,” he said to Jell. Shocked by his employee’s admission, Jell had told him to go home at the end of his work shift. He reminded Gonzales that the tank had been caulked completely last year. “The tank still stands—the tank will stand,” Jell had said.
Yesterday, Gonzales was at it again. In the late afternoon he had called Boston Police in a panic reporting that he had received a phone call from a man with a raspy voice threatening to blow up the tank. “Is this the supervisor of the molasses tank on Commercial Street?” Gonzales said the man asked. When Gonzales said he was merely a worker, the caller became angry and said: “You’re a damn liar and we’re going to dynamite the tank.” Much to Jell’s chagrin and that of tank supervisor William White, Gonzales had called police, who came to the wharf to investigate. White told Gonzales that calling the police had been a foolish thing to do, and Gonzales had the audacity to reply, “I don’t care whether it is foolish or not; the police captain sees fit to give help.” Two officers had even stayed on the site throughout the night. Jell knew anarchists were a threat, but he didn’t trust Gonzales and didn’t believe there actually had been any call.
Jell had stressed to White this morning that he must do a better job of controlling Gonzales. Firing him would be impractical at this time. Too many young men were enlisting and Jell had no time to train a new man now that alcohol production was on the upswing. But Jell thought Gonzales’s behavior was bizarre—sleeping at the tank, for God’s sake!—and that he needed to be watched closely for the sake of the business. It did not serve USIA’s purposes to have Gonzales complaining about leaks to anyone who would listen, nor did it help to draw further public attention to the tank through the presence of more police. When word got out that Boston Police responded to a phone caller who was threatening to blow up the tank with dynamite, and word spread quickly along the waterfront, it could give anarchists destructive ideas. Jell had enough pressure worrying about real dangers from violent men who hated that America was at war and hated even more those businesses that would become successful by feeding the war machine. He did not have the time or energy to worry about phantom phone callers.
The USIA operation was humming along smoothly. Jell had made his position clear to both Gonzales and White. He did not need anyone gumming up the works.
June–October 1917
With America at war, it was no surprise that socialists, the IWW, and anarchists became prime targets of the government’s antiradical crusade. Fears of radicalism, heightened by the recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia, fanned a “Red Scare” in America and a spirit of reaction that would mount as the war progressed, historian Paul Avrich noted. The U.S. government viewed radical agitation of every kind as obstruction of the war effort, and therefore anti-American, and increased its surveillance of anarchists and other militants. “Their uncompromising opposition to the war brought down on them the full panoply of government repression,” Avrich wrote. “Throughout the country, anarchist offices were raided, equipment was smashed, and publications were suppressed.” Law enforcement efforts reached a peak on June 15, 1917, when three of the leading anarchist leaders in America were arrested.
In New York, federal agents broke into the offices of the radical publication Mother Earth, and charged Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman with conspiracy to interfere with the draft. Longtime comrades and reportedly lovers, Goldman and Berkman were well known among anarchists and law enforcement officials. They had both emigrated from Russia in the 1880s, became involved with radical Jewish labor groups, and, following the Chicago Haymarket riots in 1886, both became active anarchists. Berkman and Goldman had conspired to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, chairman of Carnegie Steel, after the violent Homestead labor strike of 1892. Berkman, who actually shot and stabbed Frick, was convicted of attempted murder and served fourteen years in prison. He and Goldman founded and edited Mother Earth after his release, and in the intervening years, preached against capitalism, Big Business, worker oppression, and militarism. When the United States entered the war in April, they ardently opposed a forced draft. After their arrest on June 15, 1917, they were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.
The other prominent anarchist arrested on the same day was Luigi Galleani in Massachusetts. The Justice Department considered him “the leading anarchist in the United States,” and described his radical newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), as “the most rabid, seditious and anarchistic sheet ever published in this country.” On June 15, following an editorial critical of draft registration, federal agents raided Cronaca’s offices in Lynn, Massachusetts, and arrested Galleani at his home in Wrentham, Massachusetts, where he lived with his wife and five children. He was charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft, entered a plea of guilty, and was ordered to pay a fine of $300.
Galleani’s arrest led to police actions against other Italian anarchists, in Boston and elsewhere. Some were arrested and threatened with deportation for starting a defense fund for Galleani and his colleagues. Others found themselves tossed in jail for insulting the American flag or failing to register for the draft. Still others, including Boston’s Sacco and Vanzetti, fled to Mexico, where for several months during 1917, they conspired to retaliate against what they saw as repression in the United States through the use of bombings and other violence. A Justice Department agent later speculated that this group had gone to Mexico to receive instruction in the use of explosives.
By the fall of 1917, most of these comrades had returned to the United States. For the next three years they would live an underground existence and employ bombs as their primary weapon against government authority.
They would, as the title of a previously published Galleani collection of articles suggested, go Faccia a faccia col nemico—“face to face with the enemy.”
France, January 1918
With a flourish, Major Hugh Walker Ogden finished penning the letter to his friend, Horace Lippincott, secretary of the General Alumni Association of the University of Pennsylvania. Ogden had signed with his familiar “HWO,” rather than the “H.W. Ogden” or “Hugh W. Ogden” that he reserved for more formal correspondence. His note to Lippincott served as a cover letter to the Penn Alumni Society’s request for information about the war records of its graduates now serving in the military. Half a world away, sitting in war-torn France, Ogden had dutifully filled in every line of the form, and then written his personal note, complete with his usual bold penmanship and succinct, yet passionate, observations: “This is veritably the greatest thing on Earth and I would not exchange my present duty for any in the Army. These are wonderful days we are living in and over here is where all history is heading to its greatest climax.”
Perhaps more than anything else he had written in a long and distinguished legal and military career, Hugh W. Ogden believed these words with all his heart. Boston would send more than forty thousand of her sons overseas to fight this war that had begun with the assassination of a member of the Austro-Hungarian royal family, and had rippled across Europe, spreading death and destruction over the continent. Of all of those men, none believed more than Hugh Ogden in the rule of law and the strength of military—right and might—to achieve a just end. If history’s greatest climax meant the defeat of a Germany run amok with expansionist aggression and brutality, then Ogden would truly welcome victory as “the greatest thing on earth.”
Broad-shouldered, with a mustache, high forehead, and dark, wide-set eyes ablaze with a fighter’s intensity, Ogden was Boston’s most prominent citizen-soldier and one of the city’s best-known attorneys. A graduate of UPenn and an 1896 graduate of Harvard Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, Ogden had enjoyed a career as a partner in the firm of Whipple, Sears & Ogden for nearly two decades, specializing in equity and corporate law, before America entered the war and Ogden answered his call.
For if his profession was law, his love was soldiering. Indeed, the latter was in his genes. He was the grandson of Isaac Ogden, a general in the New York Militia, and a descendant of John Ogden, who served with a colonial regiment after emigrating from England and settling in what later became Elizabeth, New Jersey. The son of Episcopalian minister Charles T. Ogden, Hugh Ogden was born in Bath, Maine, on December 7, 1871, six years after the end of the Civil War. He became interested in the military at a young age, and in 1897, shortly after his graduation from Harvard Law, he enlisted in the First Corps of Cadets, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, as a private in Company A. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts dispatched the First Corps as part of the coast defenses during the Spanish-American War, but the unit was never mustered into active service. By 1900, Ogden had become a first-class marksman, and on June 2 of that year, he married Lisbeth M. Davis of Riverton, New Jersey. The couple had four children.
While practicing law with Whipple, Sears & Ogden, he became a second lieutenant in the 1st Troop, Massachusetts Provisional Cavalry, which was later absorbed by the Massachusetts National Guard. His fascination with things military would seem to be incongruous with not only his legal career, but with many of his other pursuits, including his interest in religion, and in particular, the Episcopal Church. Ogden served as clerk of the corporation of the Emmanuel Church in Boston and as a member of the vestry of Christ Church (the Old North Church) in the North End. He was described as one of the “outstanding Episcopal laymen” of Boston and an authority on canon law. One of his great delights was collecting rare books on church history. He was wealthy enough to do so, both in his own right, and through the $300,000 estate that he and his wife inherited when his father-in-law, John C.S. Davis, died in 1913.
It was this meshing of legal, religious, and military training that shaped Hugh Ogden’s character and beliefs, teaching him about fairness, preparedness, and a devotion to duty. When the Lusitania was sunk in 1915, Ogden assumed that America would become involved in war, and he learned to speak French in preparation for shipping out overseas. Though the United States remained neutral for nearly two more years, Ogden was ready when the call came. He enlisted and was commissioned a major in August 1917, at age forty-five, began active duty in New York in September, and was shipped overseas shortly thereafter. “He arranged his business and personal affairs and packed up his effects within the brief space of 48 hours,” according to the Boston Globe. “His departure was very quiet, and little was said about the adventure upon which he was embarking. But he went nevertheless, to engage in an undertaking of very great importance to his country and its cause, and to fill a position of the highest dignity and service in that enterprise.”
His background and training had prepared Ogden for his current position, which was judge advocate of the celebrated 42nd Infantry “Rainbow” Division, responsible for virtually all legal issues and matters of punishment within the division. “His position demands a special endowment of the judicial temperament,” one writer noted in a profile after Ogden’s division had been shipped to the front. “Moreover, it is in practice a post of some little isolation, for the officer who is to be fair and unprejudiced cannot afford to be on intimate terms with his fellow officers or to have close friends among them—he must remain more than usually aloof, and he can have no favorites.”
The formation of the Rainbow Division had been the vision of a stern and feisty colonel named Douglas MacArthur. Amid the rush by America to mobilize, individual states had competed with each other for the honor to be the first to send their National Guard units to fight overseas. To minimize the negative implications of this competition, the Army decided to create a division composed of hand-picked National Guard units from twenty-six states and the District of Columbia. Thus, the 42nd was born, “a division that stretches like a Rainbow from one end of America to the other,” in the words of MacArthur—and the nickname had stuck. The 42nd had arrived in France in November 1917, and was scheduled to enter front-line fighting in March 1918.
Ogden’s service with the Rainbow Division would continue through the end of the war, through the division’s 175 consecutive days of virtually face-to-face combat with the enemy, through its courageous participation in the Luneville, Baccarat, Champagne-Marne, Aisne-Marne, Chateau-Thierry, Saint-Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne offensives. He would be promoted to lieutenant colonel in September 1918, and would be cited for “high ability and talents and valuable services” while with the division. When the war ended in November of that year, he would serve with the American Army of Occupation in Germany as a legal adviser. In 1919, he would be asked by the Army to serve on a committee investigating court martial procedures and articles of war.
After the war, Hugh W. Ogden would receive the Distinguished Service Medal of the United States, and years later, the decoration of the Officer of the Legion of Honor of the French government, honors he certainly could not have predicted in early 1918 when the outcome of the Great War was still in doubt.
Nor could he have predicted today—sitting at his desk in France and sealing the letter to his dear friend, Lippincott—that shortly after his return to Boston, he would preside over one of the country’s most celebrated civil lawsuits, stemming from one of the most unusual disasters in United States history.
Massachusetts, February 1918
As war raged in Europe’s muddy trenches, tensions smoldered at home between U.S. government authorities and anarchists. On February 22, a team of federal agents and local police again raided the office of the anarchist newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva, in Lynn, Massachusetts. They seized thousands of documents, including a photograph of Bartolomeo Vanzetti with Luigi Galleani, and a mailing list of about three thousand names, including those of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Based on these raids, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Immigration issued about a hundred arrest warrants for Galleanists considered “liable for deportation.” Nearly half of these lived in New England, mainly in the Boston area. Many of them were among the most active in the anarchist movement, and either wrote for Cronaca or raised money for the cause. Anthony Caminetti, the commissioner general of immigration in Washington, D.C., ordered Boston immigration commissioner H.J. Skeffington to take aliens into custody and to hold hearings aimed “to establish their anarchist views and activities.” Immigration officials and local police carried out the arrests throughout the region. Luigi Galleani himself was arrested in May, but released after he was questioned extensively. He would remain free for nine more months.
On July 18, 1918, authorities finally outlawed Cronaca Sovversina, on the grounds that it was subversive, undermined the American war effort, and in the words of the Justice Department, was “the most dangerous newspaper published in this country.”
Anarchists in the North End simmered at the decision.
Spring and Summer 1918
Nearly 5 million men served in the United States Armed Forces during the First World War, about five in one hundred citizens, but it was not until the major German offensive in March 1918 that America made its supreme contribution to the Allied effort, transporting 1.5 million soldiers to France within a six-month period. Of the more than 2 million men who reached France, 1.4 million of them saw active service on the front line.
The munitions industry kept pace. They supplied American forces with the ammunition, high explosives, and smokeless powder that the troops needed to fight and win on foreign soil, and provided employment in the United States for those whose efforts supplied the soldiers overseas. Between April 1917 and November 1918, more than 632 million pounds of smokeless powder was produced in the United States, equal to the combined production of England and France. As for high explosives—TNT, ammonium nitrate, picric acid and others—U.S. production was more than 40 percent larger than England’s and nearly double that of France for all of 1918. One expert pointed out that the remarkable success of America’s munitions production effort was best illustrated by the fact that “the artillery ammunition program was never held up for lack of either the powder which hurls the bullet or shell from the gun, or the high explosive which makes the shell effective when it reaches its destination.” As they had since 1915, the companies that produced munitions continued to reap unprecedented profits during 1917 and 1918.
Their suppliers did, too. USIA manufactured the industrial alcohol that was used in the production of fulminate of mercury, acetone, and cordite—critical components of high explosives and smokeless powders. The company continued to distill enormous quantities of molasses to produce the alcohol at its Cambridge plant. The Commercial Street molasses tank on the Boston waterfront reached the 2 million-gallon level seven times during 1918, beginning in March and continuing through December.
As a result, Isaac Gonzales worked harder during the spring and summer of 1918 than he ever had, but his exhaustion had less to do with the manual labor he performed at the tank during the day than it did with the stress and physical exertion he subjected himself to at night. For even as the big molasses steamers arrived from Cuba and the islands to unload their millions of gallons of cargo, the Commercial Street tank still leaked, and Isaac was despondent.
When July rolled around and the heat had baked into Boston’s streets and buildings, Isaac had begun his cross-city runs in the wee hours of the morning to check on the condition of the tank and make sure that it was still standing. At 2 A.M., at 2:30 A.M.—he never left the house later than 3 A.M., lest he linger too long at the tank and be spied returning home by puzzled neighbors who arose at first light. On the night of each of these runs, he had left his wife, concerned about him but also contemptuous, lying frustrated in the darkness of their tiny bedroom. Isaac knew of her feelings, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to check the tank.
During the day, the grueling work pace kept him from obsessing about the tank’s collapse. Helping to unload the molasses steamers, climbing into the tank to clear the outflow pipe, bolting the tank’s hose assembly to the flange atop the railroad cars—these tasks were enough to keep his mind and body occupied.
The torrid heat wave was also a distraction. The last week in July was the hottest on record in Boston, with temperatures climbing to the high 90s. Four people had died in the heat wave and several others were treated for heat exhaustion. Another death occurred the first week in August. Although some industrial plants had mechanical cooling systems for specific processes during this period, it would be several years before Willis Haviland Carrier, the “father of air conditioning,” would improve his product to the point where it could cool large buildings. Thus, Boston workers removed their ties and left their sweltering offices in droves by midday and headed to Revere Beach on the North Shore and Nantasket Beach on the South Shore. Firefighters flushed the streets by opening hydrants during the day, and Boston mayor Andrew Peters (who defeated Curley in December 1917) ordered that the “lightless nights” policy that had been implemented citywide to conserve energy during the war would not apply to Boston’s parks.
During these uncomfortable nights, most people in the city’s crowded neighborhoods abandoned attempts to sleep indoors, and in places like the North End, carried bedding to the tenement rooftops or fire escapes to find relief. Isaac had heard their nocturnal noises as he ran through the North End streets—a cough here, a sneeze there—and had been gripped by an irrational fear that they would try to stop him if they had awakened. Yet no one had ever called out to him.
The intense heat and work pace helped distract Isaac’s thoughts about the condition of the molasses tank, but never for very long. When he took a water break, or paused to wipe the sweat from his eyes with the back of his sticky hand, the tank filled his field of vision, and the molasses leaking from its seams looked like a series of brown waterfalls.
Isaac was not alone in noticing the leaks. Many days he had chased the little Italian children who lived across the street off the property—Maria, her brother Tony, and their friend, the one they called Pasqualeno—though usually not before they had filled their pails with molasses. The firefighters talked about it in the early morning when they gathered outside the firehouse and prepared to launch their boat to patrol the harbor, their anxious voices carrying across the wharf on the warm, dawn air, before the roar of the elevated railroad trains and the clatter of horse-drawn wagons began in earnest. A stableman for the City of Boston Paving Department asked Isaac what was going on inside the tank. “Sounds like the molasses is bubbling or boiling, or doing something,” he had said. Another worker told Isaac that he liked to lean up against the tank to feel the vibration against his back. “It’s a regular vibration, as though the tank is bulging in and out.”
In some ways, Isaac felt heartened by these comments; they proved that other people saw what he saw, that he wasn’t overreacting or, worse, losing his mind. In other ways, the remarks frightened him and heightened his fear and uncertainty. If the leaks were clear enough for others to see, why didn’t his company do something? What if the tank collapsed? What if someone bombed it? Wasn’t the tank more vulnerable to dynamite if it was structurally weak to begin with? Why did Mr. Jell and Mr. White ignore his warnings? White, as superintendent, was at the tank site every day. He saw the children with their pails, heard the firefighters and the city workers talking. He knew the leaks were excessive, yet he remained silent and ordered Isaac to do the same.
Fine. Isaac would remain silent, but he had told White about his late-night crosstown runs, relished the telling, in fact. He had wanted White to know how strongly he felt, all but dared White to stop him. The tank superintendent had merely grunted and turned away. The question now was: What would White do about it? If he had meant to fire Isaac, he would have done so on the spot. That had not happened. Throughout July, Isaac waited to see if his pleas about the tank would be heeded or ignored; he waited to see if his bosses would take action.
In early August, Isaac got his answer. One morning, on orders from Mr. Jell, a crew arrived and spent the next two days painting the tank, covering its steel-gray shell with a rust-brown color. Isaac and everyone else on the waterfront noticed right away that it became more difficult to see the thick molasses streaming down the sides of the tank.
The sticky liquid now blended, chameleon-like, with the fresh coat of paint, indiscernible from the tank’s wall, dropping toward the ground invisibly and silently, like a thief in the night.
Isaac had seen enough. He had warned his superiors about the tank’s condition, and they had responded with a paint job. They thought they could hide the danger. On September 1, 1918, insulted and distraught, his heart heavy, his nerves raw, worried about his own sanity and in despair over the future of his marriage, Isaac quit his job with United States Industrial Alcohol and enlisted in the United States Army. He was assigned to the 13th Battalion, 50th Company and sent to Columbus, Ohio, for training. Isaac did not know it, but the war would be over before he could be transferred overseas and he would spend his full seven months of service in Columbus.
He also didn’t know—though perhaps his nocturnal premonitions had continued even as he sought sleep in his bunk—that when he returned to Boston in March 1919, the Commercial Street wharf area would be changed forever.
Boston, November 1918
Early on the morning of November 11, 1918, before Boston firefighter George Layhe boarded the ferry in East Boston to take him across the harbor to the Engine 31 station; before Giuseppe Iantosca left his Charter Street home to begin another grueling day with a pick and shovel; before Bridget Clougherty had finished cleaning the breakfast dishes in her Commercial Street house, while her son, Martin, slept upstairs—before all of this—Boston newspapers were already proclaiming with jubilant headlines that the armistice had been signed. The war in Europe was over.
“Whole World in Delirium of Joy,” shouted the Boston Globe on its front page, and its editorial effused, “it is victory, victory at last. The old day is over, its long, dreadful night of war is past. A new day dawns.” Church bells and fire bells rang out across the city and in the suburbs. Historian Francis Russell describes the day this way: “The downtown air quivered from the shrillness of the tugboat whistles and the foghorn in the harbor. For Boston, as for all the other thronged and delirious cities, that morning was the beginning of the new, the bright promise of a future that combined the ineradicable American belief in progress with the memory of a prewar golden past that never existed but was now to be recaptured.” The day was climaxed by an impromptu victory parade featuring an effigy of the Kaiser carried on a stretcher by Haymarket Square workers and led by Mayor Peters.
The next day was designated “Victory Day” in Massachusetts by Governor Samuel Walker McCall, one of his last acts before he left the corner office to Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts lieutenant governor who won the state’s top executive office in elections that were held a little more than a week before the armistice. More than a million spectators clogged Boston’s downtown streets for the Victory Day parade, “the largest out-pouring of humanity that ever watched a parade in this city,” the Boston Globe reported.
The armistice had occurred at the right time for Bostonians, who needed a reason to celebrate after they, and much of the world, had endured a dreadful 1918 autumn battling an influenza epidemic that first showed up in early September. In a little more than two months, it had wreaked havoc of biblical proportions. When it was over, more than five hundred thousand Americans would lie dead, and estimates ranged from 20 million to 100 million worldwide. More than 25 percent of the U.S. population became ill, and an estimated eighteen thousand servicemen died of the virus; the government estimated that it would pay the beneficiaries of soldiers and sailors a total of $170 million in insurance premiums.
In Boston, the horror started in late August when sailors aboard a training ship at Commonwealth Pier had come down with the flu, and by early September, thousands of soldiers at Fort Devens had contracted the disease. The army camp became a scene out of hell. One doctor wrote in a letter: “Camp Devens has about 50,000 men, or did before this epidemic broke loose. The flu has developed so rapidly that the camp is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till it has passed … One can stand to see one, two, or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths a day, and still keeping it up.”
By October the flu was rampaging through Boston with the alarming death rates hitting the North End particularly hard. Congested tenements, a lack of fresh air, and cold buildings all added to the spread of the flu.
Across the city, theaters, clubs, and other social gathering spots were shut down. Boston schools were ordered closed when the death toll in Boston climbed to more than two hundred victims. One prominent Boston historian noted that, with the death toll rising so fast and gravediggers becoming scarce, circus tents were used to cover stacks of unburied coffins in local cemeteries. By the first of November, the epidemic began to subside, although doctors attributed a small recurrence later in the month to the number of people who crowded onto the city’s subway trains.
By the time of the armistice on November 11, Bostonians were ready to express their joy after two months of misery. The Victory Day parade was as much a celebration of the waning influenza plague as it was the end of the war.
In the offices of U.S. Industrial Alcohol, Arthur P. Jell viewed both the influenza epidemic and the armistice from a different perspective. Many of his Cambridge employees had become sick from the flu, a few had died, and his production schedule had been totally disrupted. But he had a bigger challenge. Since the late summer, munitions demand had been dropping. Now that the war had ended, USIA had to find additional sources of revenue to tide it over until the country could fully make the transition to a peacetime economy, and the demand for nonmilitary industrial alcohol grew again.
Company executives, with full support from Jell, decided that they could retool the Cambridge plant’s manufacturing processes to produce grain alcohol for the rum and liquor industries. USIA had produced some grain alcohol early in its existence, prior to its shift to industrial alcohol, and Jell was sure they could do so successfully again.
But even this strategy represented a timing challenge, one that had to be managed carefully for the company to benefit. After years of momentum, it now appeared certain that a Prohibition amendment would be ratified shortly by three-quarters of the states and that an 18th amendment would be added to the U.S. Constitution, banning the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.
The influence of the Anti-Saloon League, a temperance organization that began operations in 1893, had grown stronger in the second decade of the twentieth century. In December 1913, a parade of more than four thousand Leaguers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., singing temperance songs. League speakers, some twenty thousand strong, spoke at gatherings across the country. Letters and telegrams “rolled into Congress by the tens of thousands, burying members like an avalanche,” according to Wayne Wheeler, lobbyist for the league. The league viewed Prohibition as a way to reduce crime, poverty rates, and taxes created by prisons and poorhouses, as well as improve health and hygiene, the economy, and the quality of life in America.
The World War had accelerated the cause. The frenzy of feeling against the Germans and support for American boys in uniform gave the league a tool to use against the saloons, since most of the brewers were of German extraction. “Kaiserism abroad and booze at home must go,” Wayne Wheeler said. The League also argued that resources used for the production of alcoholic beverages were being diverted from the war efforts.
Jell knew that Prohibition would hurt the alcohol distillers while encouraging black market production. Nonetheless, if the 18th amendment were ratified, the law called for Prohibition to actually take effect after a one-year grace period, beginning in early 1920. That gave USIA a narrow window of opportunity. If it could distill enough grain alcohol in the first quarter of 1919, there would be ample time to ship it to brewers, and for them to distribute liquor to saloons and stores, before Prohibition slammed the window closed. In mid-November 1918, Jell had ordered another huge shipment of molasses from Cuba—it was due to arrive in mid-January of 1919. He would spend the time between now and then closing the books on 1918 and preparing a round-the-clock production schedule in anticipation of the January molasses shipment.
He would also have the big molasses tank on the Commercial Street wharf caulked one more time. White, his superintendent on the site, said molasses continued to leak steadily from many of the seams. Caulking would be a good idea before any new molasses was pumped into the tank. Jell had hired a caulking crew that would begin work in early December.
All in all, he was glad 1918 was winding to a close. It had been a good year for USIA, but business had begun to slow in the late summer. The end of the war had injected uncertainty into a business that had grown swiftly in the past three years. The influenza plague had been frightening, and he was not sure it had completely ended. Anarchists had the city on edge. That pesky Gonzales had created disturbances with his strange warnings and even stranger behavior; the odd man’s resignation from USIA was about the best thing that happened in 1918.
It had been three years since Jell had shepherded the Commercial Street molasses tank to completion, and throughout the war, he had managed the East Cambridge distilling plant flawlessly, meeting USIA’s daunting production quotas and helping the company achieve record profits. Assuming the molasses steamer arrived on time in mid-January, the new year also promised to get off to a strong start. Jell believed 1919 would be the year his loyalty and hard work would pay off in his long-awaited vice presidency and his transfer to USIA’s New York headquarters.
Yes, 1919 was his year. Arthur P. Jell could feel it.