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  Isaac was not alone in noticing the leaks. Many days he had chased the little Italian children who lived across the street off the property—Maria, her brother Tony, and their friend, the one they called Pasqualeno—though usually not before they had filled their pails with molasses. The firefighters talked about it in the early morning when they gathered outside the firehouse and prepared to launch their boat to patrol the harbor, their anxious voices carrying across the wharf on the warm, dawn air, before the roar of the elevated railroad trains and the clatter of horse-drawn wagons began in earnest. A stableman for the City of Boston Paving Department asked Isaac what was going on inside the tank. “Sounds like the molasses is bubbling or boiling, or doing something,” he had said. Another worker told Isaac that he liked to lean up against the tank to feel the vibration against his back. “It’s a regular vibration, as though the tank is bulging in and out.”

  In some ways, Isaac felt heartened by these comments; they proved that other people saw what he saw, that he wasn’t overreacting or, worse, losing his mind. In other ways, the remarks frightened him and heightened his fear and uncertainty. If the leaks were clear enough for others to see, why didn’t his company do something? What if the tank collapsed? What if someone bombed it? Wasn’t the tank more vulnerable to dynamite if it was structurally weak to begin with? Why did Mr. Jell and Mr. White ignore his warnings? White, as superintendent, was at the tank site every day. He saw the children with their pails, heard the firefighters and the city workers talking. He knew the leaks were excessive, yet he remained silent and ordered Isaac to do the same.

  Fine. Isaac would remain silent, but he had told White about his late-night crosstown runs, relished the telling, in fact. He had wanted White to know how strongly he felt, all but dared White to stop him. The tank superintendent had merely grunted and turned away. The question now was: What would White do about it? If he had meant to fire Isaac, he would have done so on the spot. That had not happened. Throughout July, Isaac waited to see if his pleas about the tank would be heeded or ignored; he waited to see if his bosses would take action.

  In early August, Isaac got his answer. One morning, on orders from Mr. Jell, a crew arrived and spent the next two days painting the tank, covering its steel-gray shell with a rust-brown color. Isaac and everyone else on the waterfront noticed right away that it became more difficult to see the thick molasses streaming down the sides of the tank.

  The sticky liquid now blended, chameleon-like, with the fresh coat of paint, indiscernible from the tank’s wall, dropping toward the ground invisibly and silently, like a thief in the night.

  Isaac had seen enough. He had warned his superiors about the tank’s condition, and they had responded with a paint job. They thought they could hide the danger. On September 1, 1918, insulted and distraught, his heart heavy, his nerves raw, worried about his own sanity and in despair over the future of his marriage, Isaac quit his job with United States Industrial Alcohol and enlisted in the United States Army. He was assigned to the 13th Battalion, 50th Company and sent to Columbus, Ohio, for training. Isaac did not know it, but the war would be over before he could be transferred overseas and he would spend his full seven months of service in Columbus.

  He also didn’t know—though perhaps his nocturnal premonitions had continued even as he sought sleep in his bunk—that when he returned to Boston in March 1919, the Commercial Street wharf area would be changed forever.

  Boston, November 1918

  Early on the morning of November 11, 1918, before Boston firefighter George Layhe boarded the ferry in East Boston to take him across the harbor to the Engine 31 station; before Giuseppe Iantosca left his Charter Street home to begin another grueling day with a pick and shovel; before Bridget Clougherty had finished cleaning the breakfast dishes in her Commercial Street house, while her son, Martin, slept upstairs—before all of this—Boston newspapers were already proclaiming with jubilant headlines that the armistice had been signed. The war in Europe was over.

  “Whole World in Delirium of Joy,” shouted the Boston Globe on its front page, and its editorial effused, “it is victory, victory at last. The old day is over, its long, dreadful night of war is past. A new day dawns.” Church bells and fire bells rang out across the city and in the suburbs. Historian Francis Russell describes the day this way: “The downtown air quivered from the shrillness of the tugboat whistles and the foghorn in the harbor. For Boston, as for all the other thronged and delirious cities, that morning was the beginning of the new, the bright promise of a future that combined the ineradicable American belief in progress with the memory of a prewar golden past that never existed but was now to be recaptured.” The day was climaxed by an impromptu victory parade featuring an effigy of the Kaiser carried on a stretcher by Haymarket Square workers and led by Mayor Peters.

  The next day was designated “Victory Day” in Massachusetts by Governor Samuel Walker McCall, one of his last acts before he left the corner office to Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts lieutenant governor who won the state’s top executive office in elections that were held a little more than a week before the armistice. More than a million spectators clogged Boston’s downtown streets for the Victory Day parade, “the largest out-pouring of humanity that ever watched a parade in this city,” the Boston Globe reported.

  The armistice had occurred at the right time for Bostonians, who needed a reason to celebrate after they, and much of the world, had endured a dreadful 1918 autumn battling an influenza epidemic that first showed up in early September. In a little more than two months, it had wreaked havoc of biblical proportions. When it was over, more than five hundred thousand Americans would lie dead, and estimates ranged from 20 million to 100 million worldwide. More than 25 percent of the U.S. population became ill, and an estimated eighteen thousand servicemen died of the virus; the government estimated that it would pay the beneficiaries of soldiers and sailors a total of $170 million in insurance premiums.

  In Boston, the horror started in late August when sailors aboard a training ship at Commonwealth Pier had come down with the flu, and by early September, thousands of soldiers at Fort Devens had contracted the disease. The army camp became a scene out of hell. One doctor wrote in a letter: “Camp Devens has about 50,000 men, or did before this epidemic broke loose. The flu has developed so rapidly that the camp is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till it has passed … One can stand to see one, two, or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths a day, and still keeping it up.”

  By October the flu was rampaging through Boston with the alarming death rates hitting the North End particularly hard. Congested tenements, a lack of fresh air, and cold buildings all added to the spread of the flu.

  Across the city, theaters, clubs, and other social gathering spots were shut down. Boston schools were ordered closed when the death toll in Boston climbed to more than two hundred victims. One prominent Boston historian noted that, with the death toll rising so fast and gravediggers becoming scarce, circus tents were used to cover stacks of unburied coffins in local cemeteries. By the first of November, the epidemic began to subside, although doctors attributed a small recurrence later in the month to the number of people who crowded onto the city’s subway trains.

  By the time of the armistice on November 11, Bostonians were ready to express their joy after two months of misery. The Victory Day parade was as much a celebration of the waning influenza plague as it was the end of the war.

  In the offices of U.S. Industrial Alcohol, Arthur P. Jell viewed both the influenza epidemic and the armistice from a different perspective. Many of his Cambridge employees had become sick from the flu, a few had died, and his production schedule had been totally disrupted. But he had a bigger challenge. Since the late summer, munitions demand had been dropping. Now that the war had ended, USIA had to find additional sources of revenue to tide it over until the country could fully make the transiti
on to a peacetime economy, and the demand for nonmilitary industrial alcohol grew again.

  Company executives, with full support from Jell, decided that they could retool the Cambridge plant’s manufacturing processes to produce grain alcohol for the rum and liquor industries. USIA had produced some grain alcohol early in its existence, prior to its shift to industrial alcohol, and Jell was sure they could do so successfully again.

  But even this strategy represented a timing challenge, one that had to be managed carefully for the company to benefit. After years of momentum, it now appeared certain that a Prohibition amendment would be ratified shortly by three-quarters of the states and that an 18th amendment would be added to the U.S. Constitution, banning the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

  The influence of the Anti-Saloon League, a temperance organization that began operations in 1893, had grown stronger in the second decade of the twentieth century. In December 1913, a parade of more than four thousand Leaguers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., singing temperance songs. League speakers, some twenty thousand strong, spoke at gatherings across the country. Letters and telegrams “rolled into Congress by the tens of thousands, burying members like an avalanche,” according to Wayne Wheeler, lobbyist for the league. The league viewed Prohibition as a way to reduce crime, poverty rates, and taxes created by prisons and poorhouses, as well as improve health and hygiene, the economy, and the quality of life in America.

  The World War had accelerated the cause. The frenzy of feeling against the Germans and support for American boys in uniform gave the league a tool to use against the saloons, since most of the brewers were of German extraction. “Kaiserism abroad and booze at home must go,” Wayne Wheeler said. The League also argued that resources used for the production of alcoholic beverages were being diverted from the war efforts.

  Jell knew that Prohibition would hurt the alcohol distillers while encouraging black market production. Nonetheless, if the 18th amendment were ratified, the law called for Prohibition to actually take effect after a one-year grace period, beginning in early 1920. That gave USIA a narrow window of opportunity. If it could distill enough grain alcohol in the first quarter of 1919, there would be ample time to ship it to brewers, and for them to distribute liquor to saloons and stores, before Prohibition slammed the window closed. In mid-November 1918, Jell had ordered another huge shipment of molasses from Cuba—it was due to arrive in mid-January of 1919. He would spend the time between now and then closing the books on 1918 and preparing a round-the-clock production schedule in anticipation of the January molasses shipment.

  He would also have the big molasses tank on the Commercial Street wharf caulked one more time. White, his superintendent on the site, said molasses continued to leak steadily from many of the seams. Caulking would be a good idea before any new molasses was pumped into the tank. Jell had hired a caulking crew that would begin work in early December.

  All in all, he was glad 1918 was winding to a close. It had been a good year for USIA, but business had begun to slow in the late summer. The end of the war had injected uncertainty into a business that had grown swiftly in the past three years. The influenza plague had been frightening, and he was not sure it had completely ended. Anarchists had the city on edge. That pesky Gonzales had created disturbances with his strange warnings and even stranger behavior; the odd man’s resignation from USIA was about the best thing that happened in 1918.

  It had been three years since Jell had shepherded the Commercial Street molasses tank to completion, and throughout the war, he had managed the East Cambridge distilling plant flawlessly, meeting USIA’s daunting production quotas and helping the company achieve record profits. Assuming the molasses steamer arrived on time in mid-January, the new year also promised to get off to a strong start. Jell believed 1919 would be the year his loyalty and hard work would pay off in his long-awaited vice presidency and his transfer to USIA’s New York headquarters.

  Yes, 1919 was his year. Arthur P. Jell could feel it.

  FIVE

  HEAVY LOAD

  Boston, December 20, 1918

  John Urquhart, a boilermaker for Walter W. Fields & Sons in Cambridge, knew ten days ago when he first started caulking the Commercial Street molasses tank that he would have a difficult job ahead of him. Molasses leaked from several different seams, squeezing through the rivets and sliding down the steel walls like lazy brown rivers, plopping onto the pavement below and spreading slowly into thick pools. When Urquhart first washed the molasses off, pinheads of the dark liquid reappeared instantly on the lap seams, like blood refilling a cut.

  Urquhart had been busier than ever during the last few months, and the influenza epidemic had disrupted his schedule by depleting his best crews. Many of his finest workers had become ill or had died, and Urquhart had been forced to hire men who were less skilled and less reliable. There had been complaints from some of his customers, so he had decided to undertake his most important jobs alone. This had given him peace of mind, but had set him back on some of his key projects. The Commercial Street molasses tank was one of these. It probably should have been caulked earlier, but he was not able to begin the job until December 10, and, because he worked alone, it had taken him twice as long. For ten straight days, as raw wind whipped off the inner harbor, stinging his eyes and burning his face, he washed the stubborn molasses off with hot water, caulked the seams with his tools, then washed the pinheads again and recaulked.

  Working alone on this job, perched on a rigging chair high above the ground, John Urquhart had had plenty of time to think. It had only been a month since the whole city and the entire country were celebrating the end of the war, and already, things were starting to change for the worse. Like the molasses oozing stealthily across the pavement below him, Urquhart believed that the pain and fear caused by the flu epidemic was spreading into other areas, too.

  Many men were out of work, and Urquhart knew that two factors were responsible for it. First, war industries—mainly steel plants and munitions companies—were retooling their factories or shutting down abruptly. Urquhart had read that these industries employed 9 million workers, and he wondered where they would all go. Second, soldiers and sailors were already starting to return home; 4 million men would return to America, forty thousand to Boston alone. Would there be jobs for them? Would they expect factories to hire them out of gratitude for their service and fire other men? How could the factories hire anyone if they were closing down?

  And then there were the labor unions. Urquhart knew many union men, and knew also that the big organizers, like tough-talking Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, were already threatening strikes if wages or work hours were cut.

  Everyone was concerned about prices, too. The Boston Elevated had just raised its fares from seven to eight cents; Urquhart remembered that it was only five cents two years ago. The price of coal was going up, and so was the cost of clothing and food.

  It seemed to Urquhart that last month’s victory celebrations may have hidden many problems that were lurking just below the surface. Now those problems were squeezing their way out, just like the molasses inside this tank, and he didn’t think there was any equivalent of caulking that could push them back in. Some workers on the Commercial Street wharf had whispered that U.S. Industrial Alcohol should scrap this tank and build a new one that didn’t leak. Urquhart thought the same about the economy; that the country would now have to scrap its reliance on war production and replace it with something new to accommodate all the working men without jobs. Otherwise there could be trouble.

  He remembered the recession before the war. Men who worked with their hands had suffered the most, their families cold in the wintertime and hungry all year long. Today, the unions were stronger, workers resented the profits the big corporations were making, and soldiers and sailors returning from Europe would surely feel that their country owed them a living. Urquhart did not think that these people would tolerate hunger
or cold or unemployment meekly or quietly. It made him feel a little queasy that President Wilson was in France to discuss peace in Europe even while tension and unrest were growing at home.

  Urquhart knew that all of these issues were out of his control and would be decided by smarter men. What he could control was his handiwork on the molasses tank, and finally today, just a few days before Christmas, he had finished caulking. The tank was ready for the big molasses ship that was scheduled to arrive in mid-January and pump hundreds of thousands of gallons of molasses from its hold compartments. John Urquhart had been a boilermaker for fourteen years and was proud of his talent and his attention to detail. When a man paid him for a job, he did that job well, and the molasses tank was no different.

  Urquhart climbed down from his rigging chair and looked up at the massive tank. He squinted against a pale-gray sky and let his eyes scan each seam, slowly, taking care not to confuse molasses with the rust-brown paint that covered the tank’s walls. He nodded his head with a sense of satisfaction. It had seemed like an overwhelming task, an impossible task, when he began, but that just proved that if you stayed with something day after day, you would eventually accomplish your goal.

  Urquhart had definitely accomplished his goal this time. After ten days of nonstop caulking, the leaks had stopped. The real test of Urquhart’s skill would come when the new molasses was pumped into the tank’s well—but he was sure the lap joints would hold.

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 10, 1919

  Arthur P. Jell squirmed in his chair after the upsetting telephone conversation with the Boston Police. The new year was not beginning the way he had hoped. He had thought that the end of the war would bring about an end to violent anarchist activity in Boston, but apparently that was not the case. A Boston police officer had discovered a number of placards tacked onto Commercial Street buildings threatening violence, and the police department was contacting North End business owners to alert them. The officer told Jell that the placard apparently was in response to Congressional action two months ago that toughened the existing Immigration Act by making it easier to deport anarchists. That triggered the issuance of a deportation warrant for Luigi Galleani, leader of the Italian anarchists in Boston, and eight of his closest associates. They were regarded by the Bureau of Immigration as being “among the most dangerous aliens yet found within this country.” The police officer told Jell that legal maneuvering had delayed Galleani’s deportation and he had remained free.