The notices were entitled “GO-HEAD” and condemned the “senile fossils ruling the United States” for passing a deportation law affecting all foreign radicals. Jell had written down the exact text as the officer read the message: “Do not think that only foreigners are anarchists. We are a great number right here at home. Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores. The storm is within and very soon will leap and crush and annihilate you in blood and fire. You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you.”
The notice bore the signature, “The American Anarchists,” but police said the circular was the unmistakable work of Galleani’s followers; their mentor was the prime target of the new deportation law. Witnesses told police that they saw an old man and a boy distributing the notices. Police assured Jell that they tore down the signs quickly.
Jell took this threat seriously. Although the war had ended, the Commercial Street molasses tank still represented a symbol of war and Big Business to the anarchists; the newspapers were full of stories about the enormous profits realized by the munitions industry and the companies that supported it during the past four years. The bomb that had been discovered at USIA’s Brooklyn plant in 1916, undoubtedly planted by foreign anarchists living nearby, was still fresh in Jell’s mind, as was the telephone threat that Gonzales had reported last year. Jell had been skeptical at the time, had doubted that any call had taken place, and believed the whole incident was a figment of Gonzales’s twisted imagination. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if Gonzales was telling the truth, as the discovery of these most recent anarchist posters indicated? Jell was awaiting the arrival of a molasses steamer from the Caribbean in just a few days. Any disruption at the tank could prove disastrous to his plan to outrun Prohibition by producing alcohol as rapidly as possible at the East Cambridge distillery.
All of these were good arguments to rehire the private security guards at the tank that Jell had dispensed with after the armistice.
Still, Jell had to balance the anarchists’ threats against the cost of hiring full-time private security guards. The molasses distilling business had taken a downturn since munitions demand had plummeted late in the summer of 1918. Until production ramped up again and USIA realized revenue from the sale of alcohol to liquor distributors, Jell had to hold the line on costs. And his superintendent, William White, worked at the tank site for most of the business day and could watch for suspicious characters lurking about the area.
No, Jell decided he would not rehire a full-time private security force. Now that the police were aware of this latest threat—they had made him aware of it, after all—he was sure they could provide adequate security on the waterfront. The warning from the police department about the anarchist placards was unnerving, but it wasn’t enough to panic him into boosting his expenses.
“The tank will be safe,” Jell said aloud, sitting alone in his office. “The ship arrives next week. We’ll be ready to go.”
France, January 10, 1919
The day dawned bittersweet for Hugh Ogden. As of the first of the year, he had been relieved from further duty with his beloved 42nd Division, and assigned permanently to the Office of Civil Affairs at the headquarters of the 3rd Army of Occupation. Today was the day he would leave France and the brave men of the 42nd, and travel to Coblenz, Germany to advise officials on procedures as the Germans attempted to set up a civilian government. He had just finished writing to his friend, Lippincott, at the University of Pennsylvania, about his reassignment, suggesting “it might be of interest to some of my friends among the alumni.” Ogden looked forward to his new assignment and was thankful that the war had ended. But he would miss France and miss the Rainbow Division, his division, a band of men that he felt epitomized the definition of courage under fire.
France had been the scene of much bloodshed and horror during this terrible war, but for Ogden, it had also been the place where the troops of the 42nd had fought with valor and honor, not because they liked to fight or wanted to die, but because they sought peace. Ogden believed that some men were willing to sacrifice their own lives in war so that many more could live, and the Rainbow Division was made up of such men. He believed those men exemplified the importance of a strong standing army. Military strength not only could win a war, but could prevent future wars. “There are those who visualize the horrors of war and probably believe that the way to abolish war in general is to abolish the army,” he would write years later, after his return to Boston. “Inadequacy or lack of military strength has never yet prevented a nation from going to war. It never will. We must profit by the lessons of the Great War by insisting upon an adequate degree of military and naval preparedness.”
Hugh Ogden had learned a great deal about men in this war. He learned that a man would scream when shrapnel tore his flesh—and scream louder when swarming trench rats did the same, as he lay wounded and helpless, his buddies unable to get to him before the hungry rodents ripped him apart. The rats, millions of them, many as big as cats, had feasted on food scraps and dead bodies in hundreds of miles of trenches across France and Belgium. Toward the end of the war, they had become emboldened enough to also attack those wounded men who were too weak to fend them off.
Ogden also learned that even the strongest man would sit down on the battlefield and weep, or try to gouge his own eyes out, or simply go mad with terror when the incessant pounding of artillery fire first shattered his eardrums and then his sanity. The shell-shock cases were the worst to see, strong men breaking down, shaking with terror, babbling incoherently, facing torment for months or years or forever.
He had learned about heroes, too, good men who had put themselves in harm’s way to save their comrades. The Rainbow’s poet, Joyce Kilmer, was one of these. Sergeant Kilmer was leading a few other soldiers into a wooded area in search of enemy machine guns, when he was killed on July 30, 1918, his dream of writing a major book about the war dying with him. His men buried him at the edge of a little copse known as the Wood of the Burned Bridge in France, a peaceful spot fit for a soldier-poet.
Ogden knew of other brave men. One had hurled himself onto a live grenade that had been thrown into a trench among five soldiers; he was killed, but the other men survived. Another had single-handedly charged an enemy machine gun nest to clear the way for his unit’s advance; he took out the nest but shortly thereafter he bled to death, his upper leg cut to ribbons by the merciless rapid fire. Two more men had risked running across an open, muddy field carrying a stretcher, under blistering enemy fire, to rescue a wounded buddy. Though further hampered on their return by the weight of the wounded man and the thick mud sucking at their boots the whole way across the field, they managed to somehow avoid the gunfire and reach the safety of the trench.
Gen. John J. “Blackjack” Pershing and Col. Douglas MacArthur were the renowned members of the Rainbow Division, but Ogden knew that it was the everyday infantrymen, the Doughboys, who were the heart and soul of the 42nd.
Ogden did not often become friendly with these soldiers—his position as judge advocate would not allow it—but he admired their bravery and grit and mettle in the face of death, pain, suffering, disease, and cold. War had provided Ogden with an opportunity to observe men laboring under extraordinary hardships, something he had never seen before. As one of Boston’s most prominent corporate attorneys, the battles he fought had been confined to boardrooms and courtrooms and the exclusive Harvard Club—rarefied circles and dignified places where men of refinement and good breeding talked in hushed tones and negotiated reasonable compromises, then retired to side rooms to drink brandy from snifters and smoke expensive cigars. At the very worst, a bad decision could cost these men money, but never their lives. He once considered the stakes to be high in these corporate dealings, until he had traveled to the killing fields of France and watched the Rainbow Division in action.
Then he had learned what high stakes were all about.
This lesson had helped Hugh Og
den reach a decision. He expected to be in Germany for a few months, and then would return to Washington, D.C., to review Army court martial procedures. He was likely to be discharged in the summer of 1919. After that, he would return to Boston, but not to his old law firm. He needed a change, a new start where he could apply the lessons he had learned from the 42nd, of sacrifice, of helping others, of committing to a cause greater than oneself.
The only way to do that was to establish his own law practice. He would work alone and make his own decisions. He would still specialize in corporate work, but when an individual came to him, a man who was not wealthy but needed legal help nonetheless, perhaps even a former member of the Rainbow regiment, Hugh Ogden could take the case without concerning himself with the firm’s reputation or standing in the Boston power structure. There would be a monetary price to pay, at least initially, but money was not an important factor at this point in his career.
What was important was for him to make a small difference when he returned stateside, to dedicate his civilian life to accomplishments that symbolically exemplified the major difference the men of the 42nd had made in the trenches and on the battlefields of Europe. “They will not sleep in Flanders Fields unless we pick up the torch they bore so high and carry on in the great cause for which they had died,” he would declare in a speech several years later. “We have to make safe the cause of liberty by living for it—perhaps, indeed, a harder task than theirs who died for it. They did not give their lives so the great might have further privilege to oppress the small, so that the rich might abuse the poor, and that discontent and envy, hatred and malice might thrive unchecked in our body politic.” Ogden had learned that Americans had the duty to help others when they needed help, and sacrifice for the greater good when called upon, as their troops had done when called upon in Europe. “The privilege of self-sacrifice is as great and the need is greater than it was in 1917,” he would conclude in the same speech years later.
Now, in January 1919, preparing to travel to Germany to join the Occupation Army, Hugh Ogden believed he had drawn enough inspiration in the heroic actions of the Rainbow Division to seek a higher legal calling when he returned to civilian life. He was more determined than ever that the law would work for all people; men or women, wealthy or poor, Brahmin or immigrant. He would do what he could to uphold the principles that drove him to become a lawyer in the first place—careful deliberation, wise counsel, unwavering honesty, and a devotion to the truth.
He could not predict exactly how this new commitment would affect his future. He just knew it would.
Boston, January 12-13, 1919
It was bitter cold as Frank Van Gelder brought the Miliero into port just after 11 A.M. on Sunday, January 12. Sunbeams reflected silvery off the choppy gray-black water, producing brilliant light but generating little heat. The temperature was in the teens, and a stiff wind whistled across Boston’s inner harbor, rattling the pilings that supported the long walking pier that extended from the wharf. According to weather reports, the mercury would drop to 2 degrees Fahrenheit by nightfall.
The Miliero carried 1.3 million gallons of molasses. Van Gelder’s crew would pump six hundred thousand gallons into the Commercial Street tank to fulfill Arthur Jell’s order for the Cambridge distillery, and then steam to USIA’s Brooklyn plant to unload her remaining seven hundred thousand gallons. At 11:20 A.M., tank supervisor William White gave Van Gelder the go-ahead, and the captain ordered the discharge pumps to begin off-loading the Miliero’s cargo. Despite the severe cold, the molasses flowed smoothly through the pipe into the monstrous tank, an unexpected though not entirely unusual bonus, part of the “queer behavior” of molasses that Van Gelder had seen throughout his career.
The dock was deserted and peaceful this Sunday morning. No freight trains chugged along Commercial Street, no horse-drawn wagons or motorized trucks crowded the wharf area, no stevedores shouted as they hoisted large wooden crates, no farmers herded squealing animals onto ships, no chickens shrieked as they met their demise at the slaughterhouse across the street. The only sounds were the pulsating hum of the hydraulic pumps pushing the molasses through the intake pipe, the low tones of conversations between the Miliero crew members as they went about their work, the distant squawk of the gulls circling overhead, and the occasional whinny or snort from the horses in the nearby city stables.
The unloading progressed smoothly all day Sunday, throughout the night, and into the next morning. Van Gelder’s log book showed that the pumping was completed at 10:40 A.M. on Monday, January 13, 1919, well after the Sunday-morning quiet had given way to the rush of a new workweek on the wharf. It had taken just under twenty-four hours to pump more than a half million gallons of molasses from ship to tank. “We had no trouble with this delivery,” Van Gelder would say later. “We finished the next morning (Monday) and it was a normal discharge.”
By 11 A.M. Monday, as the wharf grew crowded with horses, wagons, delivery men, railroad cars, livestock, beer barrels, and shipping crates, Van Gelder had maneuvered the Miliero across the inner harbor and pointed it seaward, full-speed ahead toward New York.
Behind him, mere feet from the Clougherty house, where Bridget hung laundry; mere feet from the Engine 31 headquarters where George Layhe and his buddies worked; from the city stables and the North End Paving Yard; from the freight houses and Boston Elevated railroad trestle; from the spot where little Maria Distasio and Pasquale Iantosca collected firewood and scooped molasses into their pails; from the pump-pit where Isaac Gonzales had once slept; from the wooden fence where the American Anarchists had tacked up their placards threatening to dynamite area targets—mere feet from all of this—stood the fifty-foot-tall Commercial Street tank, gleaming in the late-morning sunlight.
Van Gelder was well into open water before the loudest of the sounds started from inside the tank, but William White heard them as he stood in the pump-pit. The firefighters heard the noises, too. So did the teamsters delivering beer barrels to the dock. The warm molasses that had just flowed from the Miliero’s hold was mixing with the cold, thick molasses that had been congealing inside the tank for weeks, producing a bubbling churn that vibrated against the tank’s walls. The men on the Commercial Street wharf heard those walls groaning, had heard them groan many times before, usually immediately after a delivery, but it is unlikely that they knew that when warm and cold molasses mix, the reaction triggers a fermentation process that produces gas. And in a near-full tank, that gas increases the pressure against the steel walls.
There was one other thing these men could not have known. With the addition of the Miliero’s latest delivery, the tank was now filled to near capacity with 2.3 million gallons of molasses that reached a height of forty-eight feet, nine inches, and weighed 26 million pounds.
Never in Boston’s history had an aboveground receptacle held more.
PART II
Waves of Terror
SIX
BEFORE …
Boston, Wednesday, January 15, 1919, 4 a.m.
Martin Clougherty walked home from the Pen and Pencil Club on this damp Wednesday morning with elation and wistfulness as his companions, both tugging at him like lovers competing for his affections.
His elation was easy to understand. Since acquiring the club outright three years ago, he had succeeded in amassing nearly $4,000, more than enough to purchase a nice home in Revere, or other points north of Boston, for him and his family. He finally could move his mother, sister, and brother out from the shadows of the elevated railroad trestle, away from the unending noise and the pervasive grime, far from the stench of horse manure and slaughtered chickens. It was time to leave the North End, and Martin finally had the means; he would meet with his accountant that afternoon to hammer out the details of selling his club and his mother’s house.
Martin’s wistfulness was nearly as strong, but more complicated to define. There were the usual feelings of anxiety that came with leaving familiar surroundings for parts unknown
. He would miss the boys at the Pen and Pencil Club. He had built a successful business from scratch and considered many of the bar’s patrons his friends. He enjoyed the rich conversation he overheard while he tended bar, often joining in as he mixed and poured drinks. The spark he felt when the club was jumping, the camaraderie that warmed him as surely as a shot of top-shelf whiskey—Martin wondered if he would ever again experience those feelings.
The loss would soon extend beyond Martin’s world, and perhaps that was the true cause of the sad nostalgia that played around the edges of his otherwise good spirits. Prohibition was coming. In a matter of days, maybe a single day, one of a handful of states vying for the honor would become the thirty-sixth state—representing three-quarters of the nation’s forty-eight—to ratify the Constitutional amendment that would prohibit the legal sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. There would be a one-year grace period to allow manufacturers, distributors, and tavern and restaurant owners to prepare for the economic impact of the law, and then Prohibition would be in full effect.
It was a foregone conclusion that by January 1920, the United States would be dry.
No longer would Americans be able to experience the warm glow of a tavern on a snowy evening, or the taste of a cold beer as the summer sun baked the city streets. No longer would working men be able to unwind with a drink after a dusty day of hauling cargo on the docks, nor would journalists enjoy swapping raucous opinions about Wilson’s peace plans while ordering double shots of brandy to fuel the debate. Martin thought that Prohibition would make it more difficult to make friends, meet women, conduct business, and enjoy life. These thoughts alone were enough to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm.
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