The past few days I've been thinking a lot about the General Slocum disaster.
It's a mostly forgotten story now, but the General Slocum was a passenger steamboat that was used for excursion trips around New York during the turn of the 20th century. In 1904 it caught on fire and sank in the East River, and over a thousand people died (there were less than 1400 aboard to begin with). Most of them were women and children. They were on a church-sponsored picnic outing.
From top to bottom, the story of the General Slocum is about corporate greed, and corruption, and incompetence:
The fire was probably started by a match or cigarette (!) in the Lamp Room, which was full of straw, oily rags, and lamp oil (!).
A child told the captain that the ship was on fire, but the captain ignored him. The crew didn't properly inform the captain of the fire until ten minutes later.
The captain inexplicably made for North Brother Island, even though other islands were closer. Steering directly into headwinds spread the fire faster.
The crew hadn't practiced a fire drill in the past year.
None of the safety equipment on the ship worked, because the steamboat company found it cheaper to pay off safety inspectors than to keep their ships up to code.
There was a hose on board, but it was so old and rotten that it burst when the crew tried to hook it up. The crew then gave up trying to put out the fire or help anyone and abandoned ship.
The lifeboats were wired to the deck, and the wires had then been painted over, rather than removing the lifeboats each time the ship got a fresh coat of paint, so it they were impossible to lower.
The life preservers were filled with cork. They were supposed to weigh a certain amount, so the manufacturer had put lead bars in some of them to make weight.
Others were so old that the cork inside had disintegrated into powder. Solid cork floats. Powdered cork sinks.
That meant that some of the mothers who survived described putting life preservers on their babies and throwing them into the river to escape the flames, and watching them sink.
Very few people could swim at the time, and everyone was wearing the heavy wool clothing of the period. Hundreds of people drowned.
The disaster decimated the immigrant community of Little Germany on the Lower East Side, where most of the deceased were from. Fathers who hadn't been able to attend the picnic because they were working got home to find their wives and children were all dead. Dozens of bodies were either never found, or found but never identified.
Though multiple safety inspectors and employees of the steamboat company were indicted, only the captain - who very much became the scapegoat for the whole thing - was convicted. The steamboat company paid a nominal fine. The one silver lining was that state and federal safety regulations were strengthened in the aftermath.
Like I said at the beginning, this story is mostly forgotten. A lot of historians credit that to the Titanic upstaging it just a few years later. Adella Wotherspoon, who survived the General Slocum as a baby and lived until 2004 (!), said she knew why: "The Slocum people were very poor or middle class. They were often German immigrants. The Titanic and other ships had celebrities."
I don't really have a moral to this story, except that safety regulations matter, ships full of immigrants are just as important as ships full of rich people, and humans have pretty much always been the same, as far as I can tell.
(If you want to know more, I highly recommend Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum by Edward T. O'Donnell, the excellent Wikipedia page, and the Bowery Boys podcast episode on the disaster.)
