PROGRESS AND THE GENERAL SLOCUM

I lived in Manhattan for a decade. And as I drank my Sunday morning coffee and read my New York Times in Carl Schurz Park,  above 86th Street and East End Avenue, I was completely oblivious that the East River is not a river.

It is a tidal race, the southern arm of the sound that defines Long Island.  And just to the north of my semi-private sanctuary, was the birthplace of the United States Army Corp of Engineers. Without their skill and brains (and the largest man made planned explosion of the 19th century) New York City would have remained a second class harbor… and a thousand men, women and children might have been spared a terrifying and painful death.

A few minutes after 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday 15 June, 1904 “The General Slocum” -  a 235 foot long, 37 foot wide side paddle wheel steamship built for passenger excursions around New York - , left the  East Third Street dock, carrying 1,300 German Lutheran immigrants (mostly women and children) to a picnic on Long Island.

The “Slocum’s” three decks were barely half full, and the children waved to the people on shore as 68 year old Captain William Van Schaick guided her from atop the pilot house up the East River at 16 knots toward the Hells Gate.

Every high tide that pours into the East River from New York Harbor in the south and Long Island Sound to the north,  swirls between Manhattan  the Bronx and Queens on Long Island where it slams into the delayed tide approaching from the opposite direction. For thousands of years, this titanic struggle occurred unseen by European eyes in a rock garden between Astoria Queens, on the Long Island shore, and Ward's Island in mid current,  

A hundred years after  the Royal Navy frigate HMS Hussar was driven onto the rocks near North Brother Island in 1780, fortunes and lives have been smashed on infamous outcrops bearing colorful and deadly names such as  "Frying Pan Rock" and "Bald Headed Billy".

 Eighteenth century New York City resident Washington Irving described the Hells Gate this way; “…as the tide rises it begins to fret; at half tide it roars with might and main, like a bull bellowing for more drink; but when the tide is full, it relapses into quiet, and for a time sleeps as soundly as an alderman after dinner. 

"In fact, it may be compared to a quarrelsome toper, who is a peaceable fellow enough when he has no liquor at all, or when he has a skinful…plays the very devil.” 

But the real danger was the combination of the current and  the rocks which randomly thrust up from the bottom muck, like knives and daggers,  Wrote Irving, "Being at the best of times a very violent and impetuous current, it takes these impediments in mighty dudgeon; boiling in whirlpools; brawling and fretting in ripples; raging and roaring in rapids and breakers; and, in short, indulging in all kinds of wrong-headed paroxysms....woe to any unlucky vessel that ventures within its clutches.” 

And, because of the delay in the tide coming down Long Island Sound, there are four high tides a day at Hells Gate , each paired peak  separated by two hours, keeping the Hells Gate in perpetual motion. That made the glacier scared bottom of the East River a deadly obstacle course.

“Three channels existed…the main ship channel to the north-west of the Heel Tap and Mill Rocks; the middle channel between Mill Rocks and Middle Reef; and the east channel between the Middle Reef and Astoria, from which Halletstts Reef projected; and vessels having traversed one…had to avoid Hogs Back and several smaller reefs…(and avoid) Heel Tap Rock…Rylanders Reef, Gridiron Rock of the Middle Reef .” (p.264. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Leveson Francis Yernok-Hartcourt 1888) By the late 1840’s a thousand ships a year were running aground in the Gate, ten percent of all the ships which entered.

In 1850 Monsieur Benjamin Maillefert was paid $15,000 to remove Pot Rock (above) - “rising like a rhinoceros horn from a depth of thirty feet to within eight feet of the surface...right next to a shipping lane” near the Queens shore. Maillefert lowered a canister of black powder on a rope and the resulting explosion managed to chip four feet off the horn. 

Two hundred and eighty-three similar explosions later and Pot Rock was safely 18 feet below the surface. Similar attacks on the Frying Pan and Ways Reef dismantled the great whirlpool which had spun south of Mills Rock for five thousand years. But the start of the American Civil War in April of 1861 gave the merchants of New York more pressing and profitable places to invest their money. Hells Gate remained closed to all but the bravest and most foolish captains.

On that warm and lovely Wednesday morning, 15 June, 1904, the General Sherman (above), plowed her way northward, her 31 foot great paddle wheel pushing the river  behind her . She glided past the tenements of the lower East Side, her single coal powered boiler trailing brown smoke behind. Few of the 3 1/2 million residents of New York bothered to take notice of the commonplace passage she made that day, as he had for the last 13 years.  

At 14 knots she was soon approaching the Hell's Gate, at the southern tip of Ward's Island. Here the Harlem River branched off to the right, while the East Channel of the East River turned east, and headed for Long Island Sound.

 In 1871  General John Newton of the United States Army Corps of Engineers took over the work of finally rendering Hells Gate a safe passage. 

His first target was Hallet’s Point Reef, “, a three-hundred-foot rocky promontory that reached out from Astoria…” And this time General Newton intended to perform the entire task by a process he described as “subaqueous tunneling”.  A cofferdam was constructed extending the Astoria shore, and digging with pick and axe and shovel from this extension the reef was under-mined with four miles of tunnels.

It took seven years. Then, 30,000 lbs of nitroglycerine – the most powerful explosive available at the time – was set off on 24 September, 1876. The explosion threw up a 123 foot plume of water. And the reef was gone.

In 1877,  General Newton built a another sea wall around Flood Rock and another 70 foot deep shaft. was dug.

What followed was the now standard shafts and galleries reaching out below the East River bed. At the same time a similar process was underway at Mill Rock (above). 

It took nine years to undermine these obstacles, but on 10 October, 1885 General Newton’s daughter, Mary, pressed an electrical key that simultaneously set off both sets of the charges. It was, “The greatest single explosion ever produced by man (intentionally)” - up to that time. 

Nine acres of East River bottom were pulverized. Columns of water rose 150 feet into the air. In that instant the Hells Gate became a safe passage for commercial  ships -  even excursion boats for children's picnics.

Just before ten o'clock , on 15 June of 1904., a boy told deck hand John Coakley, that he had seen smoke in a forward stairwell. Coakley, who had worked on the General Slocum for all of 17 days, found the source of the smoke to be a storage room. He then made two crucial mistakes. He opened the door, which fed air to the smoldering fire. And when he ran for help, he left the door wide open behind him.

 The fifteen crew members rushed to pull down a fire hose, but none of the hoses on board had been inspected since the Slocum had been built, 13 years before. At the first surge of  pressure the fire hose split apart. The crewmen then ran for a second hose ,  but they had to search, since they had never had a fire drill. Meanwhile the fire was drawn through the open door and sucked up the chimney of the three-deck stairwell.

Captain Van Schaick (above) was informed of the fire seven minutes after crewman Coakley had discovered it.

Van Schaick had never lost a passenger and he now decided now to add steam and head for North Brother Island, three miles ahead. There was a hospital on the island, and a gentle shoreline where the passengers could safely wade ashore. 

However, as he rang up for more power from the engine room, Van Schaick could not see he was fanning the hungry flames behind him, trapping the terrified passengers at the stern. 

When they reached for life jackets (above), visible in racks all over the boat, passengers found them tied down with wires to prevent theft. Those who managed to break the wires and free the preservers found they crumbled in their hands.  They had not been inspected for a decade. “The hard blocks of cork inside them were reduced to find dust with the buoyancy of dirt. 

...Most people jumped (over board) without them, but some people actually put them on, (and) plunged over the side and went straight to the bottom.” Some of those who managed to stay afloat were mauled by the paddle wheel, still driving the General Slocum through the Hells Gate at 16 to 18 knots - full power.

A witness at 138th street told the “Brooklyn Eagle” the General Slocum appeared in a cloud of smoke and fire, its whistles screaming, trailed by tugs, launches and even rowboats, all trying to help. “The stern seemed black with people…some were climbing over the railings…the shrieks of the dying and panic stricken reached us in an awful chorus…One by one, it seemed to me, they dropped into the water. As the Slocum preceded, a blazing mass, I lost sight of her around the bend, at the head of North Brother Island”

Captain Van Schaick failed in his attempt to run the General Slocum aground on North Brother Island, instead grounding on a rock in eight to ten feet of water. 

To people who did not know how to swim, and who were wearing layers of heavy Victorian wool clothing, anything over six feet of water was a near certain death sentence. 

The fire still raged, the upper decks collapsing into the hull, as police and firemen fought to save those who could be saved. ,

But eventually the circle of boats which had followed as the Slocum ran upstream, got smaller and smaller, as the would be rescuers came to realize the cries for help from the water had gone still.

Only the crackle of flames and the lapping of bodies against the shore of North Brother Island could be heard. New York City would run out of coffins for the 1,021 dead, mostly women and children.

In the final insult to the 321 survivors, the Captain jumped to a tugboat as soon as his ship grounded. He did not even get wet.

Seven people were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury. Officers of the Knickerbocker Steamship Company were indicted but never charged. The company paid a small fine for falsifying inspection records. Shortly there after the owner sold off his ships and walked away very wealthy. 

Trials for the inspectors who had failed at their jobs, all resulted in mistrials. 

Only Captain Van Schaick was convicted of criminal negligence. Two years after the disaster - in 1906 -  he was sentenced to ten years in Sing Sing prison. But he was paroled by President Howard Taft in December of 1911. Captain Van Schaick died in 1927, at the age of 91.

The burned out hulk of the General Slocum was converted into a coal barge and renamed the "Maryland".  She sank in a squall south of Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1911. 

In 1997, ninety years after the Slocum disaster, 104 year old survivor Catherine Connelly told a reporter, “If I close my eyes, I can still see the whole thing.”

“Yes, sir. Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand causalities. And most heart rending scenes…Not a single life boat would float and the fire hose all burst…Graft, my dear sir. ..Where there’s money going there’s always someone to pick it up.” James Joyce, “Ulysses”.

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HERE COMES SANTA CLAUSE How To Make A Myth

I call it a recipe for magic. You begin with one pious Greek aesthetic. Let him rise at room temperature for a millennium or two before blending a little religious fear mongering and a revolution or two, add a smart-ass frat boy, an academic in ancient languages and just a pinch of the Bowery boys. Pour this mixture into the crust of an illiterate German-American and then bake at 350 degrees for a century. What comes out of the capitalist oven is pure piping hot magic. I told you it was  recipe for magic.

A scant 200 years after Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, the faithful in Alexandria, Egypt got curious about when exactly Jesus had been born. There were no records, of course. And in loo of any, the magi came up with a magical answer.  Now, Matthew, Mark and Luke all said Jesus had been crucified on the morning after the Jewish “Passover” meal – putting his death squarely in the spring. But the Alexandrian magi decided it would be magical, meaning religious, if Jesus had been conceived on the same date on which he would die 33 years later. Nine months after the Jewish spring festival of Passover, comes the Jewish mid-winter festival of Hanukkah. And that, as near as I can tell, is the first compromise explaining how Jesus came be born on 25 December.

It didn't hurt that the popular god Mithra (above) and the even more popular the Unconquered Sun god,  Sol Invictis (below), were already sharing that birthday. As Christian mouthpiece Cyprian of Carthage pointed out not long before losing his head in 258 of the Common Era, “Oh, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born . . . Christ should be born." 

So now Christians could join the pagans in celebrating the birth of their gods – small “g” - alongside the birth of The God – large “G” - despite all the un-Christian behavior associated with the celebrations - over eating and boozing and dancing and sexually suggestive behavior like singing naked in the streets. And not long after this popular idea reached Constantinople, so did Saint Nicholas.

Now, for most of the last 1,300 years the Catholic Church has celebrated Nicholas as Bishop of the rich port of Myrna, on the southern coast of what is today Turkey. But while most early saints achieved sainthood by either being eaten by lions, stoned to death, lost their heads like Cyprian, or – a lucky few – were crucified Christ-like for refusing to renounce their faith. 

However, Nicholas (above) died of old age and in his own bed. All he did to achieve sainthood was give his entire inheritance to poor children. Well, to the church, of course, to feed and clothe poor children. To the average Christian that made Nicholas, who died on 6 December, 343 C.E., a saint. It also helped that “manna” periodically dripped from his tomb, and was sold as a miracle cure-all. Still the church officials, who mostly depended on rich people for their operating funds, have never been entirely convinced about this poverty being good for the soul, thing.  So it was not with their help, but the rise of Islam a couple of hundred years later that, started Saint Nicholas on the road to his north pole workshop.

Because it was Islamaphobia which financed the 3 Italian ships that arrived in Myrna in 1087. Claiming the Muslims were about to ransack his tomb, the sailors bribed and bullied their way into Nicholas' church...

...smashed the shrine, stole, er, rescued, his bones – henceforth referred to as “relics” (above) - and spirited them home to Bari, at the top of the heal of the Italian boot. 

It seemed a perfect fit, because Bari had been the home of a pagan goddess named Pasqua Epiphania – the Grandmother – who once a year filled children's stockings with gifts. Now Nicholas would do the same, every 6 of December.

With the publicity machine in Bari now squeezing money out of Pilgrims, Nicholas also became useful when Christianity was marketed to the pagan Anglo-Saxons of Germany and the Norse of Scandinavia, who had worshiped the blood thirsty Woden and the violent Thor. Every fall the white bearded Woden (above) would mount his flying horse and wearing his red cloak sailing behind, ride across the heavens, burning and destroying anything and anybody who got in his way. 

Also sailing across the heavens with Wooden was the Norse god of thunder, Thor (above). He drove a chariot pulled by a pair of flying goats, improbably named Gnasher and Cracker. But Christianity found a way to tame these 2 angry and violent deities by making them children.

Every 6 December, the youngest boy in northern churches would don a false beard, Bishop's robes, and chose the foods and music for the St. Nicholas feast, afterward leading the other boys into the streets to collect alms for the poor. And if some of the lads should occasionally form gangs of snowball-throwing muggers, stealing from the rich and poor alike, well it was all in the domesticated spirit of Woden and Thor.  But St. Nicholas would not become Santa Claus until the Americans had driven out the British.

The American Revolution didn't really change that much. The Church of England became the Episcopalians, and the 13 colonies became 14 states, but mostly the people running things in 1775, locally anyway, were the same people running things in 1783 – English religion, English language and English class structure. 

As to be expected, the post war generation rejected their parent's social conventions, and about 1804 -  when John Pintard founded the New York Saint Nicholas Society - younger Gothamites decided to retroactively convert their grandparents' provincial illiterate English backwater into a provincial illiterate Dutch backwater. 

And the cox man directing this voyage back to the future was a 26 year old Manhattan rich-kid smartaleck named Washington Irving (above).

When he joined the St. Nicholas Society in 1809, Irving's contribution was writing the cities' new foundation myth, the verbose and pretentious mockumentary, “History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker” (above).  The author's name, like everything else in the book, was an overwritten joke. A worker who baked children's clay marbles was called, in Dutch, a Knickerbocker, and during the Federalist Period it was the equivalent of calling the author “Joe the Plumber” or “John Q. Public”.

Irving did not invent “Sinter Klass” - the Dutch translation of St. Nicholas. That figure was already filling children's stockings in Holland every 6 December. But the European Sinter Klass (above) was a pretend bishop who supposedly arrived by boat from Spain – the Netherlands used to be owned by Spain – and was accompanied by his Moorish assistant Zwarte Piet - Black Pete.  St. Nicholas delivered presents to good children and Black Pete left coal and twigs in the stockings of bad children.  But uncomfortably in America most black skinned people were slaves, so Irving avoided that moral complication by dropping the assistant, and re-imagined Nicholas as...

...a jolly, little plump Dutch elf wearing a tri-cornered hat, a red waistcoat above a “huge pair of (yellow) Flemish trunk hose,” and smoking a clay pipe. Irving's history claimed everybody in New York believed in this Sinter Klass.  In trurth, few in New York had ever heard of him. The entire thing was a gag, a joke, a jape. Irving's “History...” wasn't the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” - another adapted Dutch story -  but as any writer will tell you, Irving could never have written the latter without having already written the former.  Still it was, “The first notable work of imagination in the New World" in somebody's opinion.

Enter printer William Gilley, yet another member of the St. Nicholas Society.   One of his most successful money makers was his annual illustrated series, “The Children's Friend”. In Volume 3, which came out in 1821, appeared an anonymous poem which began with good intentions - “Old Sante Claus with much delight,  His reindeer drives the frosty night , O'er chimney tops and tracks of snow...”  But the author wanted a politically correct Christmas, so Sante promised, “...No drums to stun their Mother's ear, nor swords to make their sisters fear; but pretty books...”  Beyond the fun police, the poem also introduced Santa driving a sleigh pulled by a  flying reindeer.  Gilley later insisted the unnamed author's mother had been “an indian” who lived in the north where reindeer were common and could fly.

That same year one of Gilley's neighbors also put pen to paper.  He was an academic who had already composed the well-named 2 volume “Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language” (1809), and similar ponderous intellectual non-fiction.  But Clemet Clarke Moore (above) was also a part time poet and the father of six children (he would eventually sire nine), and he wanted to make their Christmas as joyful as possible. 

So as Christmas 1822 approached, Moore decided to compose his own version of the myth, but with no lectures.  It began, “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there...”

Under Moore's professional and well educated hand everything came together – St. Nicholas, Christmas eve, snow, and flying reindeer. But it was Moore the poet who rhythmical multiplied the beasts, with just a faint hint of those flying goats.  “Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Dunder and Blixem”. The last two names were Dutch for thunder and lightening, but within three editions of the poem their names had morphed into “Donner and Blitzen”, which still scanned. 

But Santa remained Irvings' original creation, a “jolly old ELF”- a dwarf, a munchkin, a little person, with a “round LITTLE belly”. That was how he fit down the chimney. And he was driving “...a MINIATURE sleigh and eight TINY reindeer”.  Saint Nicholas not only delivered toys, he was a toy. How magical is that? All that was missing was for somebody to bring all these pieces together.

I suspect that Thomas Nast  (above) was dyslexic. Although his family had arrived from Germany when he was only 6 years old, “Tommy” was never comfortable reading or writing in English or German. But after finances forced him to drop out of the National Academy of Art, on Broadway and Leonard Street in lower Manhattan, the 15 year old became a staff artist for Frank Leslie's Weekly Illustrated Newspaper. Four years later he was offered more money by the New York Illustrated News as an artist-reporter. And the next year – 1860 – the now 20 year old was sent to England to cover a prize fight, and then on to Sicily to cover the war to unite Italy.   On his return Nast – with just 50 cents in his pocket – was hired at a generous salary by Fletcher Harper, to draw for his “Harper's Weekly Illustrated News”.

Over his quarter of a century at Harper's, Nast invented the elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party - inspired by a mass escape from the Central Park Zoo - and popularized the donkey for the Democrats. Nast would scratch his drawings directly onto wood, before they were copied into metal plates for printing

Still his accurate caricatures so enraged Tammany Hall boss, William Tweed (above and below), the crooked politician ordered his supporters to “Stop them damn pictures... My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures." 

But Nast turned down a $500,000 bribe to quit, and hounded Tweed until he was arrested. After Tweed jumped bail and escaped to Spain, it was Nast's famous drawings which ensured Tweed's extradition. But it was Nast's yearly Christmas drawings that changed Santa Clause from a diminutives regional figure, into first a national and then an international symbol.

In 1861 Tommy Nast had married Sarah “Sallie” Edwards, “with brown hair, a graceful form and delicate damask cheeks”. In his drawings she became his idolized image of “Columbia” (above), symbol of the United States. The couple remained deeply devoted to each other for the rest of their lives, and raised 5 children together – 3 girls and 2 boys. Sallie was his business manager, and it was she who read Clement Moore's poem to Tommy, and he enshrined it's images for all time. 

 And as his children grew, so did his Santa Claus, 24 Christmas in a row, 76 etchings in all - becoming a full-sized St. Nicholas, a bearded and smiling hedonist, a real person, unrecognizable anymore as the aesthetic Bishop of Myrna.  And he had a new address. Instead of coming from “the north”, Santa's workshop was at the North Pole.

And there were the Christmas Cards, an invention inspired in large part to market Nast's beloved images. And he presented the first image of a child mailing a letter to Santa Claus. 

Santa's  pipe, which had started out as a Dutch practical clay, Nast replaced with meerschaum. And from Nast's own Bavarian childhood, he included a Christmas Tree in the party. Thomas Nast's etchings transcended linguistics. In Europe, where St. Nicholas' Feast was still being celebrated on 6 December, Nast's Santa Claus began shifting the holiday emphases to 25 December.

After Thomas Nast, little changed about Santa Claus until Joe Mizen, who painted billboards for the Coke-a-Cola Company, and came up with a tie-in for the Famous Barr Company Department store in St. Louis, Missouri, which boasted they had the world's largest soda fountain. He called his 1930 creation “The Busiest Man in the World”.(above)  Once again it treated the latest incarnation of St. Nicholas as a real man, and Coke decided to use the ad in magazines all that year. 

But the image worried Archie Lee, the executive for the Coke account at the D'Arcy Advertising Agency, who imagine beer companies hijacking the image, once prohibition came to an end.  Lee felt Coke needed a more wholesome and realistic Santa. And one of the artists he hired to develop this mythical real man was Haddon Sundblom.

Sundblom modeled his Santa after his friend, salesman Lou Prentess.  And from 1931 to 1964, Haddon was the man who defined what Santa Clause looked like, for all of us - “...plump belly, sympathetic face, jovial air, and debonair bearing.”  In this modern version, the traditional Santa was full sized, but his workers were still elves. 

And that was the new mythology of Santa Claus. Like the mold (above) created to support a myth. And now there is a ninth red nosed reindeer. 

It is hard to imagine how Santa will change in the future.  My guess is we will have to go backward, again, and reinvent the past.  Or perhaps envision Santa Claus as a computer server delivering presents via reindeer drones.  However the future comes, I am certain Santa will never die. Mythical characters never do. Not really. Just ask Mythra, Pasqua Epiphania or Sol Invicits.

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