The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 25 January 2021
by Stephen Puleo
When he was growing up in a Boston suburb, just north of town, this reader would occasionally experience the sensation of smelling molasses in the air, while riding an MBTA train out of North Station, on the old elevated Orange Line tracks to Charlestown. If you're from the area, you know what we mean. Perhaps it was an illusion, or the fermentation of rotting algae in the Mystic River below. Perhaps it was the Schrafft's candy factory between Charlestown and the Boston Edison power plant. Perhaps it was something else entirely, the rumored olfactory remnant of a bizarre industrial disaster sixty years earlier (and now more than a hundred years ago). During the lunch hour on a bright winter day, somewhat warmer than usual for January, but still a chill forty degrees, a giant steel tank containing over two million gallons of blackstrap molasses ruptured and collapsed, spreading a wave of black sticky liquid through the waterfront neighborhood of the North End, killing scores of animals, injuring 150 people and killing twenty-one unfortunate men, a woman, and a couple of children. The disaster has become almost legendary, because it sounds absurd that people would be drowned in a flood of molasses (where did it even come from?). It became an enjoyable anecdote on the tour bus on the stretch between the Old North Church and Old Ironsides. But it was an ugly day, and as convincingly portrayed in this short but compelling narrative, it included such historical elements as the Italian anarchist movement, lax industrial labor laws, immigration and citizenship, the triangle of trade that defined early New England prosperity, the onset of Prohibition, and perhaps most pressing, the industrial push for war materiel and profit in World War 1.
That's a lot of history to impose on one strange and tragic event, one that could easily be written off as the expression of poorly understood industrial practice that we could comfortably assume is so much less likely a century later (didn't a highway bridge just collapse in 2007 in Minnesota, killing 13 drivers?). That it involved molasses is almost funny, as a story, but it ties the disaster to so many things. The triangle trade that enriched Boston in the early days of the republic involved shipping molasses from the West Indies to Boston, where it was refined into rum, which would be placed on ships to Africa to be traded for slaves shipped to the West Indies to harvest sugar and produce molasses shipped, once again, to the Northeast. In the early decades of the twentieth century, it was clear that a push to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages would crush the businesses that relied on molasses for their profits. But, along came the first world war, and industrial grade alcohol was used to produce munitions. Companies like USIA, which owned this massive molasses tank, made money hand-over-fist even before the United States entered the war. The tank itself was constructed in 1915. It was built to certain standards that were borderline for supporting such a massive amount of a heavy liquid, and even then, it turned out to have actually been built with substandard materials. The tank leaked profusely, neighborhood kids (kids who lived in a relatively poor neighborhood full of non-citizen Italians) would scoop up the leaked molasses and take it home. The tank was built cheek-by-jowl with an elevated rail line, tenement housing, a fire station, a civic stable, and a busy port at which animals were shipped for slaughter. On the fateful day in January of 1919, all of this was impacted by a thirty-foot-high wave of molasses engulfing unfortunate victims. Photos of the aftermath are haunting and horrific.
But did it just fall apart? Or did Italian anarchists blow it up? They had been responsible for scores of deadly bombings around the country, to discourage America's entry into the war, but also, one supposes, as any modern day anarchist might agree, to defeat the rapacious forces of capitalism, and restore the country to the people for their just use (hard to imagine it ever really working). The book describes in detail much of this movement and lists many shocking events that we rarely attribute to American history, but the fact is revealed that violent insurgent activity is a perennial element of American history. Maybe local anarchists, friends of the infamously executed Sacco and Vanzetti, blew up the tank for its part in the munitions trade.
That's a lot for one book to cover, but it isn't over when the last victim is pulled from the sticky morass, and the last molasses washed off of trolley cars miles from the site of the disaster. What ensued was one of the most massive and earliest of class action lawsuits alleging industrial negligence against a large and wealthy corporation. The hearings, which took years to complete, left behind a massive transcript which is much of the source material for this book. First-hand accounts, construction details, historical elements, stories of an immigrant community, and political activism, all of this wells up from the black mass of molasses spilled across Boston that day over a century ago. The book is a bit of a tour-de-force of popular historical narrative. It is full of surprises you won't have heard in your high school history courses. Check it out.