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“A good sense of timing and an easy voice” From
Kirkus Reviews
“Superb characterizations … enthusiastically
recommended” From NewPages.com
“Thoroughly researched …. weaves together stories
of the people and families” From The Associated
Press
“The definitive account of America’s most fascinating
and surreal disaster.” From the San
Francisco Bay Guardian
“Giving a human face to tragedy is part of the brilliance”
From The Boston Sunday Globe
“Everything you want in a work of history” James
O’Toole, author of Passing for White
“A must-read for anyone interested in Boston history”
Thomas H. O’Connor,
author of The Hub: Boston Past and Present
“A good sense of timing
and an easy voice”
From Kirkus Reviews
Boston native and journalist Puleo takes an incident that
seems to belong in a Marx Brothers movie and resituates it
in the city’s social history. The 15-foot-high wall
of molasses that inundated the streets of Boston's North End
in winter of 1919, the debut author explains, flows into such
issues of the day as “immigration, anarchists, World
War I, Prohibition, the relationship between labor and Big
Business, and between the people and their government.”
With a good sense of timing and an easy voice, Puleo sets
the scene for the disaster to come: the rush to complete a
giant tank holding more than two million gallons of molasses,
the failure to have it properly tested, the blind eye that
parent company US Industrial Alcohol turned to the tank’s
copious leaks, and the threats it levied at workers who complained.
The author also paints the period’s social picture.
Discrimination against the North End’s Italian-born
residents and their lack of political participation, whether
barred from it or of their own volition, were important factors
in the tank's placement near their neighborhood. The rise
of the anarchist movement and its strong antiwar sentiments
made the tank a tempting target, since alcohol produced from
the molasses went into the making of wartime munitions. The
sheer destructive force of the molasses flood is jarringly
presented in a number of vignettes about those trapped; 21
people died. In the ensuing court battle, Big Business was
put on notice that it would not be trusted to police construction
safety standards itself, it was not above the law, and it
would be liable for damages. Properly and compellingly recasts
quaint folklore as a tragedy with important ramifications.
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“Superb
characterizations” “Enthusiastically recommended”
From NewPages.com
Tim Davis
You see the evocative title, Dark Tide, and you speculate
on the possibilities: gothic horror? detective story? murder
mystery? Then you see the subtitle, The Great Boston Molasses
Flood of 1919, and you suspect some other possibility: parody?
urban legend? But do not allow yourself to misread the subtitle.
Instead trust your first impressions because the title is
the thematic key: Stephen Puleo’s intriguing book is,
in fact, the powerful (and remarkably true) story of a bizarre,
tragic incident in Boston’s history.
Dark Tide begins as the World War I era story of
U.S. Industrial Alcohol, a company frantically involved in
acquisition and waterfront storage of molasses, and then converting
that molasses in nearby distilleries into industrial-grade
alcohol destined for use in manufacturing munitions for the
war effort. Focusing almost exclusively on production efficiency,
however, USIA has little time for safety and security at its
North End storage facility.
But after the war, on January 15, 1919, something horrible
happens: a steel tank (of questionable structural design and
integrity) catastrophically fails, and 2.3 million gallons
of molasses—in a tidal wave of destruction—floods
into the streets, homes, and lives of the North End. When
officials complete rescue operations, and when they assess
damages, they discover that the Great Boston Molasses Flood
has killed more than 20 people and scores of animals, has
injured 150 other people, and has left mind-boggling destruction
in its wide wake.
Puleo, in the first half of Dark Tide, presents a
thorough history about what led up to the January incident.
In the second half, Puleo describes the disaster itself and
then turns the book into a compelling detective story about
who was responsible: USIA? employees? terrorists? anarchists?
immigrants? The incident later becomes the subject of a multiyear
lawsuit wherein responsibility is assigned and liability assessed,
and Puleo painstakingly documents and analyzes the successes
and failures of the case.
The exceptional strength of Puleo’s singular book comes
through most notably, however, in his superb characterizations
of the people involved in the incident and its aftermath.
Corporate managers, government officials, court advocates,
and the extraordinary citizens of the devastated North End—those
people who were immediately and horribly affected by the tragedy—come
to life in this enthusiastically recommended, important regional
history.
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“Thoroughly researched
… weaves together the stories of the people and families”
From The Associated Press
Randolph E. Schmid
It’s an idea so bizarre as to be unbelievable, a massive
flood of molasses — in January — sweeping all
before it, crushing buildings, engulfing people and horses,
battering railway tracks.
Yet it happened, claiming 21 lives in the process, with the
collapse of a giant tank containing 2.3 million gallons of
the syrup on the Boston waterfront. Twenty-one people died,
others suffered permanent injury or were left homeless in
the wake of the tragedy.
In Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919,
journalist Stephen Puleo details what happened in this first
book on the subject.
Thoroughly researched, the volume weaves together the stories
of the people and families affected by the disaster, with
often heartbreaking glimpses of their fates. Puleo sets the
scene carefully, in the context of the time and social conditions,
and follows through with the years of lawsuits that ensued.
It had been a boom time for United States Industrial Alcohol,
manufacturer of alcohol used in munitions during World War
I. But the war was over and Prohibition was looming, cutting
the market for alcohol. Hoping for one last big market, the
company had filled its giant tank with molasses, planning
to distill it into drinking spirits to sell before the ban
on alcohol took effect the following year.
Then, shortly after noon on Jan. 15, 1919, the 50-foot-tall
tank, hastily built four years earlier, gave way, sending
millions of gallons of molasses in a massive wave sweeping
across the docks, demolishing a home and fire station, and
even bending an elevated railway structure.
Martin Clougherty, who worked the night shift, was asleep
when the molasses demolished his house. "He had had the
sensation of falling overboard, had felt his head go under,
and it was only then — when the liquid rushed into his
nose and mouth, when he could taste it — that he realized
he was immersed in molasses," Puleo reports.
Clougherty was able to save himself and pull his sister to
safety. But his mother was fatally crushed in the collapsing
building. His brother Stephen died a year later in a mental
hospital.
Stonecutter John Barry was trapped in the demolished city
street repair building, others moaning around him. Repeatedly
during the day, rescue workers had to crawl to him through
the muck and inject morphine to ease his pain until they could
get him out.
Giuseppe Iantosca was standing at his apartment window watching
his son, Pasquale, gather firewood around the base of the
tank when the little boy suddenly disappeared in the dark
mass. Iantosca searched for hours before returning to his
wife Maria.
“Exhausted and disconsolate, he trudged up the dark
stairs and stepped into the house. Maria was waiting for him,
her black eyes rimmed red from crying. Neither of them spoke
— he had come home alone, and that said everything.”
The boy’s body was recovered days later.
The cleanup lasted months, the lawsuits years, the fearful
memories a lifetime.
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“The definitive
account of America’s most fascinating and surreal disaster”
From the San
Francisco Bay Guardian
John Marr
Stephen Puleo’s Dark Tide vividly
tells the full story of this classic catastrophe for the first
time. There is no shortage of inspired eyewitness testimony
on the awesome power of unleashed molasses and dramatic stories
of rescue and survival. Melodramatic, true, but how can a
molasses flood be anything else? One lucky fellow survived
by treading molasses.
Dark Tide does put the flood in its surprisingly
important historical context — ultimately, it did for
building permits what the Coconut Grove fire did for fire
codes 23 years later. But even the lengthy legal proceedings
are absorbing, thanks to the tank owners’ absurd attempts
to pin the blame for their own incompetence on bomb-toting
Italian anarchists. Dark Tide is the definitive account
of America’s most fascinating and surreal disaster.
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“Giving a human
face to tragedy is part of the brilliance”
From The Boston Sunday Globe
Caroline Leavitt
Ordinary people, extraordinary disasters: The wrath
of fire and flood
Shortly after 9/11, The New York Times began running thumbnail
sketches and photos of the dead. These were ordinary people,
and the things written about them were pretty everyday as
well. One father was remembered for acting out bedtime stories
to his son; a woman was famous for her tuna salad. In the
common humanity of the details, these people stopped being
part of a huge number of casualties, and instead each person
became a unique loss. And because of that, the tragedy was
all the more indelible.
Giving a human face to tragedy is part of the brilliance
of Stephen Puleo’s Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses
Flood of 1919. I’m Boston-born and -bred, but I’d
never heard of this cartoony-sounding disaster, which was
anything but comic. On Jan. 15, 1919, in Boston’s North
End, a neighborhood crowded with Italian immigrants, a 50-foot-tall
steel tank, loaded with over 2 million gallons of molasses
(the industrial kind used for World War I munitions) collapsed,
shooting out deadly steel missiles. Twenty-five-foot tidal
waves of molasses, traveling at 35 miles per hour, engulfed
the nearby neighborhood, causing massive destruction, killing
21 people, and injuring more than 150. Why did such a flood
fade into folklore, remembered only in a few children’s
storybooks?
Puleo believes it’s because the flood was never put
into proper historical context, and using newspaper accounts,
fire department files, and court records, he painstakingly
recrafts the tale. But, for me, what really brings this story
into terrifying focus are the individual people Puleo lets
us get to know.
There’s Arthur P. Jell, US Industrial Alcohol’s
overseer, who had the tank built in the midst of a busy immigrant
neighborhood because it was an easier way to meet production
quotas, a man who addressed local unease about the leaking
tank by painting it molasses-brown to hide the seepage. There’s
company man Isaac Gonzales, whose nightmares about the tank
collapsing had him running through Boston for a frantic middle-of-the-night
check. There’s John Barry, a stonecutter who survived
the flood, his dark hair shocked white overnight. And there’s
the molasses tank itself, prompting Gonzales to claim, ”The
giant steel container was alive and he was hearing the low
growl of a hungry animal.”
Who was to blame for the disaster? There were 119 separate
legal claims against USIA, but outrageously, a judge blamed
the public for not insisting that the best people be put on
the job. USIA accused antiwar anarchists of bombing the tank,
an argument fueled by the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. But there
was no physical evidence of bombing, and after a grueling,
10-year trial, USIA was found guilty, held accountable for
not hiring qualified people to oversee the operation.
After the trial, anarchy (and the perceived threat from it)
pretty much died. More Italian immigrants became citizens,
claiming some power for themselves. But until they were given
voice in this book, the characters who drove the story were
forgotten.
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“Everything
you want in a work of history”
James O’Toole, author of Passing for White: Race, Religion,
and the Healy Family, 1820–1920
Why has no one ever told this story before? The Boston
molasses flood lives dimly in popular memory, but no historian
has explored it fully until now. The results of Stephen Puleo’s
labors combine exhaustive research, shrewd analysis, careful
placement in local and national context, and an ability to
tell a good tale — everything you want in a work of
history.
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“A must-read
for anyone interested in Boston history”
Thomas H. O’Connor, author of The Hub: Boston Past and
Present
The great molasses disaster of 1919 in Boston’s North
End provided a dramatic prelude to a new era in post–World
War I America. Stephen Puleo brings it to life with vivid
prose, using the dreadful catastrophe as a lens through which
to view the panorama of a changing Boston, as well as to survey
the major events that would shape the future of twentieth-century
America. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Boston
history.
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