Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood

by Stephen Puleo

A Book Review by Tiffany Clark

March 2009

Although I ordered and perused several of the books on the approved list, I had to stick with (pun intended) Stephen Puleo’s Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. First was the readability. Let’s be honest, it does play a factor. As a teacher of younger students I am constantly working on finding “hooks” or avenues of accessibility for my students. I appreciate it when an author does the same for me. Stephen Puleo not only selected an intriguing topic, the collapse of a 2.3 million gallon molasses tank, but approaches it in a very accessible fashion. An AHTC mantra: “learning about national and world history through the lens of local history” is epitomized in this book. He deftly combines political, social, personal, business, and historical trends, facts, and even details weaving a good story in a rich and significant context. “Nearly every watershed issue the country was dealing with at the time –immigration, anarchists, World War I, Prohibition, the relationship between labor and Big Business and between the people and their government –also played a part in the decade-long story of the molasses flood. To understand the flood is to understand America of the early twentieth century.” (p. x) Each of these aspects relates to the cause and/or the effect of this disaster. By approaching it in a myriad of ways it allows me, with my limited knowledge of the history of the time, to access themes and trends of the day and make connections to today.

Puleo primarily uses the court records from the three year trial that succeeded the tank’s demise. There were ten of thousands of pages of documents. Included were eyewitness accounts, interviews, plaintiff backgrounds, etc. There is an even more interesting Afterword. The author had been on a speaking tour and an audience member produced a letter from her grandfather in-law who was in Boston at the time the tank broke. The 17 year old was on a ship in the harbor and rushed to rescue as many as he could, then chronicled it in letter to his mother. While Puleo turns court record into a readable story, this letter was even more powerful. Photos from the time are also effective in drawing attention to the scope and devastation cause by the 15 foot wave of molasses.

Steven Puleo did a nice job of explaining the historical context and making it relevant to the central incident. While reading this book I was particularly struck by the patterns of behavior echoing in today’s world. As you know from my time with AHTC, I am especially interested in encouraging children to become active participants in the history that we are creating right now. Understanding patterns, trends, and the results of decisions/philosophies are what I want to teach my students (abet in a scaled back form) and what I found powerful about this book. I intend to empower the children I teach today to enable them to avoid the mistakes of the past and craft a better world. (Sounds pretty hokey, I know. But this IS where my passion comes from).

One aspect that I was unaware of was the importance of molasses to the history of our country. Puleo places the molasses industry in a historical context. Molasses financed the slave trade in the Americas, brought slavery to America from the West Indies, was a staple of the diet of the colonist (both in food and drink form), influenced the “Sugar Act” which was a factor in the Revolutionary War, and then used to make munitions up through WWI. Such a simple substance as a root of many of our pivotal moment seems unbelievable.

One of the social trends that Puleo discusses in detail is the disenfranchisement of the immigrant Italians. He discusses how the home culture created a population that revolved around small, insular paesani or small ethnic enclaves. This was clearly a survival strategy of strangers in a strange land, but had the result of making the Italian population politically vunerable in the larger arena of the city of Boston. According to Puleo, “by 1910, only about 25 percent of the Italians in Boston had been naturalized.”(p36) These people were also socially discriminated against. They were seen as the dregs of society. As such they did not have a political voice of their own, nor someone to stand up for them. These would influence the decision to build a potentially dangerous, certainly unsightly, molasses tank directly at the edge of the neighborhood.

I find this interesting as it mirrors some of the trends we see today. As was explored in AHTC’s comparative media study of A Civil Action, people with no voice and who suffer from ignorance, are often taken advantage of by those in positions of power. As America becomes more litigious and there are more, often lucrative, avenues of redress, I imagine the problem becoming global. America exporting her problems to poor or powerless countries rather than communities. Even those with power are struggling with these issues. Was not China recently entering a debate about who is responsible for the emission from the factories there? Those who purchase the products or those that produce the products?

Puleo goes into some depth exploring issues surrounding Big Business. Some of these issues are: an individual’s place and power in such a system, business’s responsibility to the community, government support for Big Business as a strategy to deal with powering down from a war time economy, returning laborers (soldiers), and the rising cost of living, and finally “the people” turning against Big Business due to the arrogance and irresponsibility that tend to be its hallmarks.

Puleo explores the pressures a company can put on a single person, which can lead to poor decision making, as in the case of Arthur P. Jell. Jell was the man who was put in charge of the construction of the molasses tank. At the time he was a treasurer on a fast track for a leadership position in the United States Industrial Alcohol (USIA) company. Jell had no expertise in such an engineering project, and as such made poor decisions in specs he asked for and the quality control he was responsible for. He was also pressured by a time table affected by things out of his control including negotiations on the property, scheduled arrival of a huge molasses shipment, the weather and the death of a worker. All of this contributed to poor quality and ultimate danger of the tank. After the trial, these issues brought about reforms on construction safety standards. This case influenced the adoption of engineering certification law in all states (p234).

Puleo also brings up the question of a government that is pro-big business. USIA was a major producer of industrial alcohol which was made from molasses at the time. This alcohol was needed to make munitions for the war effort, both before America got officially involved (when it was providing munitions for others), and after it entered the war (outfitting “our boys”). When does government need offset responsibility to her citizens? Which “need” is greater? The government trusted (or didn’t care) the industry to make responsible choices. While Puleo doesn’t answer these questions explicitly, the actions of USIA speak clearly. Of course, in today’s world, this brings up the government bailout of the financial industry. One has to wonder where all the money that is being thrown at the problem is going. Today’s government trusted Big Business to be responsible with the money that was given them. It does make one question the theory that Big Business will take care of the people.

I briefly want to touch on another trend of the day that resonates with today’s world. During the trial USIA pushed the theory that the molasses tank was blown up by ‘anarchists’. There was a pervasive fear of anarchists especially in Boston which was a hot bed for this kind of activity. This seemed quite silly to me, until I put the word ‘terrorist’ in its place. Much of the fear that is often given into today, often used as an excuse, was going on then too.

Stephen Puleo clearly has a love of Boston and Boston’s history in particular. He lives in the Boston area and done extensive research on Boston’s North End, where the tank was located. Combining a master’s degree in history and time as a newspaper reporter, Puleo knows which details are powerful and which ones are significant.

As I read this book I couldn’t help by notice many watershed events happening in Boston around this time. As mentioned before the molasses flood changed building codes, regulations, and permits through out the country. About that time fire code were forever influenced by the Coconut Grove nightclub fire. In addition, the same year the molasses tank broke, the Boston police went on strike. This has had ramifications for business, labor, unions, and of course police officers that are still in place today. I am eager to go to such a city and understand the events that have shaped my life today. I want to stand in the places and gain a deeper knowledge of the place that was the setting for these things. Before the Philadelphia trip, I hadn’t been East. Going there gave me a foundation with which to work from to develop my own understandings and then use that to craft ways to present the significant events, philosophies, trends to the children in my class. Boston has the same depth of history which I wish to soak up and understand.

By examining national trends and the impact they had on this one incident, Puleo pulls together an understanding of the times. He demonstrates the ramifications of political impotence, immigrant issues, labor issues, historical patterns, social issues, personal responsibility in one event. This paves the way for the reader to do the same with the trends that are in effect today.