Dark Tide (43 page)

Proceedings in the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County Upon the Presentation of a Memorial of Endicott Peabody Saltonstall
(May 26, 1923), and
Proceedings in the Supreme Judicial Court at Boston in Memory of Charles Francis Choate, Jr
. (May 25, 1929).

Harvard Law School Secretary’s Report, No
.
1, Class of 1897
(May 1899) and
Harvard Law School Secretary’s Report No. 1, Class of 1902
(April 1904).

I used the primary sources, mainly the trial transcript, to form the heart of the book’s narrative, weaving in my knowledge of the event or the time period gleaned from other sources. For example, the prologue’s description of Isaac Gonzales’s late-night runs through the North End are drawn directly from his testimony; the intense heat that is described is taken from news accounts and weather reports of the time.

In some cases, I have built the dramatic narrative and drawn conclusions based on a combination of primary and secondary sources, and my knowledge of a character’s background and beliefs. For example, Hugh Ogden’s letter to Lippincott from the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., is real; Ogden’s concerns about the manner in which the country has been thrown into turmoil is my interpretation based upon what I know of Ogden’s patriotism and his soldier’s attention to order.

Throughout the book, on virtually every subject, I consulted hundreds of pages of newspapers, primarily in the
Boston Globe,
the
Boston Herald,
the
Boston Post
, the
Boston American
, and the
New York Times
. Most of these are referenced directly in the text. Other secondary sources that I consulted as background, or from which I quoted, are most helpfully cited and grouped according to the following categories.

Since there have been no previous books written about the molasses flood, my secondary sources were limited to the newspaper accounts and a smattering of magazine articles and retrospectives through the years.

Among the most helpful were Burtis S. Brown’s “Details of the Failure of a 90-foot Molasses Tank” in the
Engineering News-Record
(May 15, 1919); Richard WeinGardt’s “Molasses Spill, Boston, Massachusetts (1919)” in Neil Schlager, ed.,
When Technology Fails: Significant Technological Disasters, Accidents, and Failures of the Twentieth Century
(Gail Research Inc., 1994); Dr. V.C. Marshall’s “The Boston, Mass., Incident of January 15, 1919” in the
Loss Prevention Bulletin
(Number 082); and my own “Death by Molasses” in
American History
(February 2001).

Other articles I looked at included: Robert Bluhardt’s “Wave of Death” in
Firehouse
magazine (June 1983); Aldon H. Blackington’s “Molasses Disaster” in
Yankee Yarns
(New York, Dodd Mead, 1954); Michele Foster’s “Triangle Trade’s Revenge on the North End” in
Northeastern University Department of History Newsletter
(Winter 1994); Ralph Frye’s “The Great Molasses Flood” in
Reader’s Digest
(August 1955); Priscilla Harding’s “The Great Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919” in
The American Legion Magazine
(December 1968); and John Mason’s “The Molasses Flood of January 15, 1919” in
Yankee Magazine
(January 1965).

Many trees have been felled to record virtually every aspect of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, but the story of the anarchist movement in America has received comparatively little attention. For that reason, I am most grateful to Paul Avrich for his fine book,
Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background
(Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1991), by far the most comprehensive work on both the anarchist underpinnings of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and the anarchist movement in Boston and the United States. Avrich’s work provides much of the source material for the anarchist discussion in this book, and is well worth reading.

Other works that cover both the anarchist issue and the turmoil that rocked America in 1919 included Louis Adamic’s
Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America
(New York, Chelsea House, 1983); Emma Goldman’s
Living My Life
(New York, Knopf, 1931); Zachary Moses Schrag’s
1919
:
The Boston Police Strike in the Context of American Labor
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard College, 1992, honors thesis for bachelor’s degree); Francis Russell’s
A City in Terror: 1919, The Boston Police Strike
(New York, The Viking Press, 1975); Rudolph J. Vecoli, ed.,
Italian American Radicalism: Old World Origins and New World Developments
(Staten Island, N.Y., American Italian Historical Association, 1973); and Colston E. Warne’s
The Steel Strike of 1919
(Boston, D.C. Heath and Company, 1963). For a later perspective on the 1920 midday bombing of Wall Street, I also referred to Nathan Ward’s “The Fire Last Time: When Terrorists First Struck New York’s Financial District” in
American Heritage
magazine (November/December 2001).

The source material available on the Sacco and Vanzetti case is too lengthy to list in its entirety here, but I found the following most helpful:
The Sacco-Vanzetti Case: Transcript of the Records of the Trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the Courts of Massachusetts and Subsequent Proceedings, 6 vols., 1920–7 (
New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1928–29); Herbert B. Ehrmann’s
The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti
(Boston, Little Brown, 1969); Felix Frankfurter’s
The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen
(Boston, Little, Brown, 1927); Robert H. Montgomery’s
Sacco-Vanzetti: The Murder and the Myth
(New York, The Devin-Adair Company, 1960); and Francis Russell’s
Tragedy in Dedham: The Story of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case
(New York, McGraw-Hill, 1962).

The historiography of the Italian immigrant experience in America is lengthy, if largely unknown. Two works that I relied on heavily for this book are William DeMarco’s fine study
Ethnics and Enclaves: Boston’s Italian North End
(UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, 1981, a revision of his Boston College thesis); and my own history master’s thesis,
From Italy to Boston’s North End: Italian Immigration and Settlement, 1890–1910
(Boston, University of Massachusetts-Boston, 1994). Both of these works have complete bibliographies for interested readers, but I also examined specific references for this book which are worth noting.

For good general studies on Italian immigration and Italians settling in the United States, see Erik Amfitheatrof’s
The Children of Columbus: An Informal History of Italians in the New World
(Boston, Little, Brown, 1973); James A. Crispino’s, The
Assimilation of Ethnic Groups: The Italian Case
(New York, Center for Migration Studies, 1980); Robert F. Foerster’s
The Italian Emigration of Our Times
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1919); Patrick J. Gallo’s
Old Bread, New Wine: A Portrait of Italian Americans
(Chicago, Nelson-Hall, 1981); Luciano Iorizzo’s and Salvatore Mondello’s
The Italian Americans
(Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1980); Jerry Mangione’s and Ben Morreale’s
La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience
(New York, Harper Collins, 1992); Humbert Nelli’s
From Immigrants to Ethnics: The Italian Americans
(Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1970); and Lydio F. Tomasi, ed.,
The Italians in America: The Progressive View, 1891–1914.

For a greater understanding of a more pertinent theme discussed in this book, the discrimination and assimilation difficulties Italians suffered as they struggled to become Americans, see Betty Boyd Caroli’s
Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900–1914
(New York, Center for Migration Studies, 1973); Alexander DeConde’s
Half Bitter, Half Sweet: An Excursion into Italian-American History
(New York, Charles Scribner, 1971); Iorizzo’s and Mondello’s
The Italian Americans
; two fine books by Richard Gambino—
Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of Italian Americans
(Garden City, New York, Doubleday and Company, 1974); and
Vendetta: The True Story of the Worst Lynching in America: The Mass Murder of Italian-Americans in 1891, the Vicious Motivations Behind it, and the Tragic Repercussions that Linger to This Day
(New York, Doubleday, 1977), which focuses on the New Orleans lynching case referred to in this book; and Michael J. Piore’s
Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies
(New York, Cambridge University Press, 1979).

For general studies of immigration and immigrants in Boston, see Roger Daniels’s
Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life
(New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 1990); Herbert J. Gans’s
The Urban Villagers
(New York, The Free Press, 1962); Oscar Handlin’s
Boston Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1941); John Higham’s
Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism
, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1988); and Stephen Thernstrom’s
The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis 1880–1970
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1973).

Historians and authors have long struggled to interpret and make sense of the ghastly and destructive war that pulled a reluctant United States from the insulation and isolation of the “long nineteenth century,” and thrust it onto the world stage and into the uncertain future of the twentieth century. Similarly, the struggle continues to this day to capture the often tortured complexity of Woodrow Wilson, the man and the president.

In my view, some of the people who have succeeded admirably at these challenges are: John Milton Cooper, Jr. in
The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1983); Marc Ferro in
The Great War: 1914–1918
(London, Ark Publishing, 1973 in English; published first in French, 1969); Oron J. Hale in
The Great Illusion: 1900–1914
,
The Rise of Modern Europe
(New York, Harper & Row, 1971); Meirion and Susie Harries in
The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917–1918
(New York, Vintage Books, 1997); Richard Hofstadter’s “Woodrow Wilson: The Conservative as Liberal” in
The America Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
(New York, Alfred Knopf, 1948, 1973); Paul Kennedy in
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
(Lexington, Mass., D.C. Heath & Company, 1987); and Charles Callan Tansill in
America Goes to War
(Gloucester, Mass., Peter Smith Publishers, 1938; reprinted by special arrangement by Little Brown, 1963).

While all of these works touched on the production of arms and munitions, the most helpful summary and analysis of this specific topic was Colonel Leonard P. Ayres’
The War With Germany: A Statistical Summary
(Washington, Government Printing Office, 1919). Prepared for the War Department, this work provides a comprehensive and impressive numerical summation, complete with charts and graphs, of the massive effort a country must undertake to feed, clothe, supply, train, transport, and arm more than 4 million men fighting a war half a world away.

For complete texts and analyses of the inaugural addresses of Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge, I also referred to Davis Newton Lott’s
The Presidents Speak
:
The Inaugural Addresses of the American Presidents, From Washington to Clinton
(New York, Henry Holt, 1994).

Volumes have been published on American slavery in the South, but certainly the subject of the molasses industry and the slave trade benefiting the
northern
colonies needs to be examined more thoroughly. Nonetheless, there are several fine works that deal with this topic.