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Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of
1919
(Beacon Press, 2003)
Excerpt from Dark Tide:
The fifty-six-year-old stonecutter John Barry heard
moaning in the darkness, felt searing pain across his back
and legs, smelled and tasted the sweet molasses as it tried
to flow into his nostrils and mouth. He was pinned face down,
his cheek mashed into the sticky molasses, only his left arm
free. He used the arm as a sweeper to keep the molasses from
smothering him. He tried moving other parts of his body, but
other than his neck, which he could twist, he couldn't budge.
Whatever was pressing on his body was crushing the life out
of him. It hurt to breathe, whatever breath he could draw
seemed insufficient to fill his lungs, and he had to be careful
not to inhale a mouthful of sticky molasses.
The darkness was total. The moaning continued, but he couldn't
tell from which direction, or from how far away. He heard
a skittering sound. A rat? Oh, God, Barry hated the filthy
rodents. Terror gripped him as he imagined a fat, hungry,
gray water rat chewing at his face while he lay helpless,
trapped in the blackness, buried alive. He called for help,
his voice raspy. Could anyone hear him? Did anyone know he
was there? He felt on the brink of madness, and with a mighty,
panic-filled effort tried to lift his body, but to no avail.
He had worked as a stonecutter since he was fourteen years
old, but with all of his strength and his skill, he couldn't
lift a hammer or a blade or a chisel to help himself-he could
barely lift his head to keep from smothering in molasses.
John Barry knew he was going to die, here, buried under the
firehouse in this dark stinking space, anonymous and unable
to move, a pool of molasses ready to swallow him, rats ready
to tear him apart, his screams falling on deaf ears. He would
soon join two of his children who had perished from influenza
last fall. But what would become of his other ten? Would they
become wards of the state when their father was gone?
He began to itch all over and couldn't do anything to stop
it. He felt his body bleeding and could not stanch his wounds.
His chest and back burned like they were on fire. He summoned
up strength and cried for help again, and this time heard
his voice resonate in the darkness. And then, a miracle: a
response! He recognized the voice of firefighter Paddy Driscoll,
trapped under here with him, one of the moaners he had heard.
"Keep up your courage, John," Driscoll said, his
voice cracking. "They'll get us out."
John Barry tried to answer aloud, but could not. His initial
shout for help had drained him of energy. Overcome with exhaustion
and emotion, his broken body wracked with pain, he could barely
manage a whisper: "I hope they hurry, Paddy," he
choked. "I hope they hurry."
He lay sobbing in the darkness, tears streaming down his
face, mixing with the molasses that stained his cheeks and
threatened to drown him.
Excerpt from Dark Tide:
(© 2003 by Stephen Puleo,
Published by Beacon Press
All Rights Reserved)
From the book's cover jacket:
Shortly after noon on January 15, 1919, a fifty-foot-tall
steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed
on Boston’s waterfront, disgorging its contents in a
fifteen-foot-high wave of molasses that traveled at thirty-five
miles per hour. When the tide receded, a section of the city’s
North End had been transformed into a war zone. The Great
Boston Molasses Flood claimed the lives of twenty-one people
and scores of animals, injured more than a hundred, and caused
widespread destruction.
There had been warnings. Isaac Gonzales, the “general
man” who worked at the tank, had heard its rumblings
and saw the molasses that leaked through its seams and streamed
down its sides. He had even seen children use pails to scoop
up the molasses that pooled at its base. His nightmares about
the tank collapsing were vivid enough to send him running
through the streets of Boston in the middle of the night during
the summer of 1918 to make sure that the tank was still standing.
But this wasn’t what Arthur P. Jell, U.S. Industrial
Alcohol’s assistant treasurer, who had overseen the
entire project—from leasing a site for the tank in a
crowded Italian-American residential neighborhood to seeing
that the tank was built in record time—wanted or needed
to hear. USIA was distilling most of the molasses stored in
the tank into industrial alcohol used to produce munitions
during World War I, and Jell needed to meet ever-growing production
quotas without interference.
For the first time, the story of the molasses flood is told
here in its full historical context. Tracing the era from
the tank’s construction in 1915 through the multiyear
lawsuit that followed the disaster, and drawing from long-lost
court documents, fire department records, and newspaper accounts,
Stephen Puleo uses the gripping drama of the molasses flood
to examine the sweeping changes brought about by World War
I, Prohibition, the anarchist movement, immigration, and the
expanding role of big business in society. It’s also
a chronicle of the courage of ordinary people, from the firemen
caught in an unimaginable catastrophe to Judge Hugh Ogden,
the soldier-lawyer who presided over the lawsuit against USIA
with heroic impartiality.
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