It's not just because of class prejudice that nothing tops The Titanic. Just the name! Largest ship ever built, enormous media hype, insanely called unsinkable and presented as the pinnacle of human technology and the symbol of a new age, which is why the maiden voyage attracted all these insanely rich people in the first place. And iceberg, plop! Done. How do you expect that to be forgotten? It's just too perfect. Anyway, two-thirds of the passengers were in steerage and they're the ones who died, most of the first-class did not.
The key with The Lusitania, of course, was that it was not an accident but hit in the middle of a war, and (eventually) became casus belli for U.S. entry to the war. So yeah, that's going to remembered for reasons other than there being rich people aboard.
The General Slocum, meanwhile, was also full of working class people, in fact almost all women and their children out for a day-trip, but it gets the New York bonus. After 9/11 it made a comeback in the memory culture as the biggest NYC disaster before 2001. Its historic significance is that it basically ended the German community of the Lower East Side.
No time to search for a more documentary style video, so tolerate this music:
And then there is the Great Molasses Disaster of 1919 in Boston's North End, where a six-story, two-and-a-half million gallon tank of molasses--used mostly in the production of munitions-- burst in a terrific explosion killing and injuring many.
The Great Molasses Flood of 1919, Boston's version of Pompeii, surely ranks as one of the city's worst disasters - and it's hard to think of a ghastlier one.
On January 15th, the outdoor temperature rose to an unusually (for Boston in January) balmy 45° (7.2° C).
Shortly after noon in Boston's North End, a rusty, already-leaking tank containing 2.3 million gallons of fermenting, smelly, sticky molasses at the bottom of Copp's Hill exploded.
Metal rivets 1/2 inch thick were torn apart and flew through air like shrapnel. Some of them cut the steel girders of an elevated railway.
The force of the explosion caused some buildings to collapse and knocked others off their foundations.
It also created a vacuum immediately afterwards that destroyed even more buildings, dragged a truck across a street, and pulled a train off the tracks.
And then the flood of molasses began.
The explosion sent what an eyewitness called a “30 foot wall of goo” down Commercial Street at a speed estimated to be 35 mph (56 kph).
The gooey mess covered the neighborhood and spread out across downtown, 2 to 3 feet thick, burying and drowning those in its path.
'I see clearly that man in this world deceives himself by admiring and esteeming things which are not, and neither sees nor esteems the things which are.' — St. Catherine of Genoa
I remember reading about the rivers of chocolate in Charlie and the Chocolate Factor as a kid and thinking how great it would be to swim in something so delicious. The thought that chocolate or molasses, something so tasty, sweet and comforting, could at the same time be dangerous and lethal is hard to imagine.
This monstrosity was, of course, located in the poorest section of Boston, where children would bring their pails to gather the dripping, sometimes streaming molasses from the leaks that continued to grow in number throughout the years. The tank's construction was rushed through in 1914 in preparation for the war. In other words, it was very poorly constructed and leaked from the very beginning. Many of these children were doing just that when the tank burst. That the higher ups knew it was just a matter of time makes this disaster all the more sinister.
Moreover,
Why did Boston store so much molasses in a tank?
Well, Boston had been a major molasses center since Colonial days, when the city was a major player in the "triangular" trade - molasses, rum, and slaves.
Sugar grown in the English island colonies of Jamaica and Barbados was turned into molasses, and shipped to Boston and nearby ports where local distillers turned it into rum. New England ships carried the rum to Africa, where it was exchanged for slaves. The ships then carried the slaves to the islands, where they were sold to work on the plantations . . . and the ships returned to Boston with more molasses.
Although the slave trade finally ended, Boston continued to be a major production center for rum. As a result, the distillers needed lots of molasses.
The tank that exploded in 1919 was the city's largest. Ironically, the molasses in this particular tank was to be used for distilled alcohol, not rum.
The tank's owner, United States Industrial Alcohol, had been warned that the tank was leaking.
[ industrial alcohol was in high demand because of World War I, since alcohol was used for the manufacture of munitions. Therefore, the tank was always full. For three years, the people of the neighborhood watched in trepidation as the tank was refilled with millions of gallons of molasses, groaning and shuddering as the weight increased up to 13,000 tons.]
Their response?
They painted the tank brown to camouflage the dripping molasses.
Within hours after the explosion, their lawyers escalated the anti-Italian sentiments already running high in Boston by blaming the explosion on Italian anarchists.
'I see clearly that man in this world deceives himself by admiring and esteeming things which are not, and neither sees nor esteems the things which are.' — St. Catherine of Genoa
