Happy Saturday. Our next episodes of the show cover somebody whose life is really just like a whole tour of previous episodes of the show, and one of the historical events that's going to come up on those episodes is the general slocum disaster, so we are bringing that one out as today's Saturday classic. Heads Up, this is probably one of our all time saddest episodes and it originally came out on June. Welcome to stuff you missed in history class. A production of I heart radio. Hello and welcome to the PODCAST. I'm racy B Wilson and I'm holly frying. The PS general slocum burned in the East River in New York on June oh four, so a hundred and fifteen years ago this month, and this disaster has also been a really frequent listener request, including from Kell, Suzanne, Linda, Jesse Torrey and Michael Um. It has some similarities to the east land disaster, which we talked about on the show a couple of years ago. Both of these vessels had been chartered for a group outing that turned into just a deadly maritime disaster very suddenly. Both of these were also topics that I knew from the start we're going to be tragic, but then turned out to be even worse than I imagined them. The Paddle Steamer General Slocum was built in it was named after Henry Warner Slocum of New York, who had served as a general in the Union army during the civil war. The ship was one of two steamers owned by the Knickerbocker steamboat company, the other being the grand republic. It was a large wooden sidewheel steamer with three decks. The General Slocum was licensed to carry up to passengers and when it was first launched it was a modern, luxurious vessel, but by nineteen o four it was really starting to show its age, although it, I'd been regularly repainted over the years, including shortly before the disaster. But it also passed an inspection on May fifth of nineteen o four. The slocum was an excursion boat intended for making short trips around New York's waterways from the spring through the fall. In the early part of the season, people could charter the whole vessel for a flat fee. Starting around the beginning of July. It operated as a ferry on the rockaway route connecting Manhattan, Brooklyn and rockaway on Long Island. For its June fifteenth nineteen o four trip, it had been chartered by St Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church at a cost of three hundred fifty dollars. The church was hosting its annual picnic to celebrate the end of the school year, and most of the people who were attending were church members who lived in Manhattan's lower east side. They lived in a neighborhood known as Klein Deutsch Land, or little Germany, because of a very large population of German immigrants and their descendants who lived there. At the time, this was one of the largest German American community us in the United States. About one thousand three hundred fifty eight passengers were aboard the Slocum on the day of the disaster. The exact number is actually an estimate, since there were tickets for this excursion, but babies didn't need one, and sometimes multiple children were brought aboard on one ticket. Since the picnic was being held on a Wednesday, most of the adult passengers were women. The men and the families were more likely to be at work. Overall, more than half the people aboard were children and only between fifty and one fifty of the passengers were adult men. These passengers were in high spirits, dressed in their Sunday best and prepared for a two hour cruise along the East River from the Third Street recreation pier to the north shore of Long Island. Once they got there, they would spend the day at a picnic ground called Locust Grove. They had food and a bar on the boat, along with entertainment provided by a band that was playing on the promenade deck. Although they embarked generally as families, once people were aboard, parents were totally comfortable letting their children go off on their own and play together. They left the dock between nine thirty and nine forty in the morning. In Command was the captain, William h Van Shaik, with first pilot Edward Van Wort and second pilot Edwin Weaver. Van Shaike had been aboard the General Slocum since its launch and had a reputation for being safe and careful, but he was also in his sixties and the general slocum had been through a number of incidents and accidents over the years, so some people thought that it was maybe time for him to retire. Not long into this journey, a fire started in the forward compartment on the main deck. It's not clear exactly how, because there were just so many possible sources. The forward compartment was being used as both a storage room and a lamp room. Machine Oil for the mechanical systems was stored in the forward compartment as well, along with two bags of charcoal and various rubbish. There were lots of other flammable materials in this wooden compartment, including three open barrels of glassware that we're packed in hey. Those had been brought aboard for the excursion. This was also where a member of the crew filled and maintained the lamps, using a makeshift table made of wooden planks laid over a couple of trestles. In the course of this work, the floor of the compartment had been covered in a thin layer of oil. There had also been an open flame in this room at several points over the course of the morning. The compartment itself had electric lighting, as did other parts of the ship, but that morning the porter who was responsible for filling the lamps had found the room to be very dark, so he had lit one of the lamps using a match. He later testified that he could extinguish the match and he had thrown it down on a bench. Someone else had been working on part of the mechanical system in the room, using an open torch as a light source. People also lit matches and had other open flame in the room for all kinds of reasons, something that was just inherently dangerous given what was in there. Shortly after the fire started, the general slogan was approaching a narrow part of the East River known as Hellgate. About that time a boy noticed smoke coming from near the forward cabin. He told a member of the crew, who apparently thought that the child was playing some kind of prank and told him to mind his business. A few minutes after that, other members of the crew saw smoke coming from the forward cabin and they realized there was a fire and started trying to put it out. The ship's firefighting equipment included a standpipe and hoses. The standpipe and its valves were in good working order, but the hoses were mostly old, cheap linen hoses. Members of the crew attached a piece of this old hose to the valve near the forward compartment and asked the engineering room to send water through the Standpipe, but as soon as the water hit that hose it shattered in multiple places. There were also a couple of newer rubber hoses on the boat and members of the crew got one of those to try again, but they couldn't get that new hose to connect to the standpipe. When they couldn't figure out why, they gave up, and an investigation later revealed that when the hose shattered, it was blown off the coupling that was holding it onto the standpipe, but the coupling itself was still there. In their panic, the crew members didn't realize that the old coupling was still connected, and if they had removed the old coupling, the new pose would have connected with no problem. This was really the last of the cruise effort to try to fight the fire. There were fire buckets on board, but they were empty and they weren't put into use. There are also reports that a hapless crew member dumped a bucket of charcoal onto the fire to try to smother it. That doesn't appear in the Federal Commission's report about the disaster and it's such a far fetched idea that someone would do that that it seems almost unbelievable. At the same time, the way the disaster progressed from here is almost unbelievable, and we're going to talk more about it after we first paused for a little break. After the fire was discovered in the forward compartment of the PS General Slocum, it doesn't appear that the captain, William h Von Shaik, personally assessed what was happening with it or gave any kind of orders to try to get it under control. Instead, he looked at where they were on the river and decided to beach the ship so that people might be able to jump to safety. The nearest land was west of the boat, in the Bronx, but this area was full of stored lumber and gas tanks. Apparently someone warned von Shaike away from it for that reason, or he decided that landing a flaming vessel there would be more dangerous than trying to find another location. The captain ordered the pilots to aim north northeast toward north brother island. This required them to travel at full steam ahead into deep water in the middle of the East River. So the PS general slocum was made almost entirely out of wood. It's middle deck was a promenade deck with that was mostly open to the air, with a smaller enclosed space in the middle. The top deck was a her cane deck that was similarly open to the air, and hurricane decks just get their name from how incredibly windy attempts to be up there. So when the vessel started bearing down toward north brother island, it was full steam ahead against the wind, and the resulting airflow across its structure quickly spread the fire from the forward compartment toward the back of the vessel. When the fire started, the passengers were spread all around the ship. There were more people on the promenade deck than in other passenger areas because that's where the band was and because the fire started in the forward compartment, most of the passengers were behind it. That meant that as the boat picked up speed, the wind was spreading the fire directly toward them very quickly. People started to panic, as various family members had got off to play or socialized. People had become separated from one another, so parents didn't know where their children were and children couldn't find their parents. Also, most of the people aboard could not swim. Swimming hadn't really taken off as a pastime in the United States at this point and clothing suitable for actually swimming was not considered decent for women to wear at all. And, as we said earlier, because this was a nice outing, the people aboard were in their Sunday best. So as the fire spread, people had a choice. They could jump into deep water, weighed down by their clothing, knowing that they could not swim, or they could stay where they were and risk burning to death. The General Slocum did have life preservers aboard, unlike a lot of the other maritime disasters that we've covered on the show, there was a life preserver for every passenger, but these were old. Some of them probably dated back to when the ship was newly built. Their covers were rotten, so when people got them down and tried to use them, some of them just fell completely apart in their hands. Others had intact covers, but the cork inside had rotted into dust. So when people jumped into the water with these on, they just soaked up the water and became incredibly heavy rather than helping people to stay afloat at the same time, though, very few of Slocum's life preservers were put into use. Some passengers, as we said, grabbed a life preserver only for it to fall apart in their hands and then they just gave up on trying to find another one. Also, the crew did almost nothing to help distribute them. One testified at the coroner's inquest that he had put one life preserver onto a person and that was the one that he put on himself. Only about fifty life preservers were definitely used during the disaster, twenty of them on people who drowned while wearing them. The slocum also had lifeboats. The boats themselves were in generally good condition, but they weren't put into use during the disaster either. The crew had never been trained on how to operate them and the mechanisms to lower them had been painted over and were immovable. Some of the lifeboats were even wired down. Even if the crew had been able to move these boats with the ship operating at full steam ahead, they just couldn't have been lowered safely into the water. The timeline of the disaster was pieced together from eyewitness testimony and it took as long as twenty minutes from the time the fire was discovered to the general slocum being beached off north brother island. During that time the fire consumed more and more of the boat and passengers jumped into the water rather than burning to death. Most drowned and some were crushed in the paddle wheels. Then, just as the boat was reaching North Brother Island, the starboard side of the hurricane deck collapsed under the weight of hundreds of passengers, dumping all of them directly into deep water. But beating the vessel off North Brother Island did not allow the rest of the passengers to jump to safety the way that the captain had hoped that it would. The vessel came to rest at an angle with its bowl between ten and twenty ft from the shore. That's between three and six MS, but that put the stern of the boat more like forty to sixty ft from shore, or twelve to eighteen meters. The current there was very fast. The water was way over people's heads and because of the way the fire had spread, almost all the passengers were towards the very stern of the ship, where they had to jump into this deep, fast moving water. It's estimated that between four hundred and six hundred people jumped into the water and drowned after the boat had been beached. North Brother Island was home to a quarantine hospital for people with contagious illnesses, and members of its staff came to the shore to try to assist. Two nearby tug boats, the John L Wade and Walter Tracy, also rendered aid and probably saved the lives of hundreds of people. Two men incarcerated at nearby rikers island compelled a doctor who was working there to take them to the site of the wreck in a rowboat so that they could help with the rescue, and there were people on other boats or boats who rode out from shore who rescued people who had jumped into the water along the way. But even with the prompt assistance of all these people from outside the ship, almost everyone aboard was injured or killed. It was the worst single day disaster in New York until the September eleventh two thousand one terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Roughly a thousand passengers died, and that was more than seventy of the passengers aboard. Only two passengers escaped without injury. Meanwhile, the crew, most of whom did not try to help stop the fire or assist the passengers was almost unscathed. Twenty three of the thirty crew escaped without injury and two were killed. For a while after being beached, the General Slocum stayed in place off north brother island. People who came to help were mostly able to get it extinguished and for a time the number of bodies pulled from the water was relatively small. So a lot of people. We're hopeful that there had been a miraculous recovery of a lot of the folks. But the East River isn't really a river, it's a title estuary that connects New York harbor to the long island sound. Consequently, it experiences regular tides and as the tides rose, it lifted the wreck, which about a mile before coming to rest again off hunt's point, which is north of rikers island. The shifting tides and currents also meant that more and more bodies started washing ashore all along the East River, something that continued for days. By One am on the Sixteenth, seven hundred thirty nine bodies had been recovered and sent to a city morgue, as well as temporary morgues on north brother and rikers islands. This disaster was catastrophic for New York City's German American community and it was also obvious that something had gone colossally unacceptably wrong. We'll get to the disaster's aftermath after another sponsor break. The disaster aboard the PS general slocum was devastating, especially in New York's German American community. At least six hundred families lost someone, and some families only had one surviving member, somebody who had been at work that day instead of on the excursion, who basically came home and found that their whole family had died. Many of the people who survived had serious burns, some of which were disabling. Many had lifelong breathing problems because of smoke inhalation and burns to their lungs. Post traumatic stress disorder wasn't recognized until decades later, but survivors also had ongoing effects on their mental and emotional health. The little Germany neighborhood of the lower east side had started to coalesce in the nineteenth century as people left Europe in the face of famine and unrest. The neighborhood really grew from the eighteen thirties to the eighteen fifties, and in eighteen fifty five it was one of the largest German communities in the world. By nineteen O four, this community had outgrown the lower east side and was starting to expand into other parts of New York. This included people who had been born to that first wave of German immigrants who wanted to get out on their own. So some of the neighborhood's population was already moving else where before this disaster happened. But afterward the neighborhood changed dramatically. People who had lost family members found it too painful and moved away, either to other parts of New York or other cities, or back to Germany. Even for people who weren't really close to any of the families that had been aboard, the sudden deaths of so many children changed the character of the neighborhood enormously. People described it as unnaturally painfully quiet. Soon the Manhattan neighborhood of Yorkville was more associated with the city's German community than the lower east side was. Other communities in New York were affected by the tragedy as well, including neighboring Italian and Jewish neighborhoods, but the lower eastsidnes German Protestant community was by far the hardest hit. St Mark's Lutheran Church also lost much of its congregation. That building still stands today and it was converted into a synagogue in ninety. Naturally, people were outraged by this incredible loss of life. The captain was also hospitalized due to injuries that he sustained in the disaster, and he was arrested while he was still in the hospital. He also received hundreds of threatening letters. People called for investigations into the accident and the steamboat company and the excursion boat industry in general. A coroner's inquest was held about two weeks after the incident and recommended that charges be brought against the president and directors of the Knickerbocker steamboat company, the captain, the company's port captain, John A P S, the ship's mate and the government inspectors who had cleared the boat. The coroner's jury also issued the opinion that the system for inspecting vessels in New York's harbors was not sufficient. Federal Commission was also convened to investigate and they issued a report on October eighth nineteen o four. By that point, the General Slocum's wreckage had been raised from the river and towed to rikers island to be pumped out, and the process, the bodies of eighteen more people were found within the wreck including one lodged in the wheel. The investigation emission personally inspected this wreckage, which was later sold and converted into a barge. That barge thank in New Jersey in nineteen eleven, but that time there was no loss of life. Nearby tugboat rescued the crew, who were the only people on board. The commission's report was scathing and found numerous problems that were not at all unique to the general slocum. To start with, it had been built with minimal attention to fire safety. It had a working standpipe in the event of a fire and it was built with the boilers that required distance from the wooden surfaces. Beyond that, though, fire safety did not seem like it had been a consideration at all. The boat didn't have fireproof bulkheads or any other feature that might slow down or stop the spread of a fire. Instead, it was almost entirely a flammable vessel, covered in layers and layers of flammable paint and varnish. The same was true of most excursion vessels that were in use at the time. The crew also was not trained in fire safety or in what to do in the event of a fire. Crews were supposed to have regular fire drills, but the slocum's crew had not had one in more than a year. Compounding this lack of training was the fact that most of the crew were seasonal workers who had been hired for very low pay. They had very little training or experience and, because they've been seasonally hired, some of them had never experienced a fire drill of any type on any ship. Ever, they were not familiar with basic things like what the ship's fire alarms sounded like or how to put on a life preserver. Another problem was an overall lack of maintenance, with many life preservers and fire hoses literally rotten with age. After the General Slocum disaster, other companies started replacing their worn out, rotten life preservers with new stock, but that uncovered another problem. Compressed blocks of Cork were commonly used to make life preservers. An employee at a life preserver factory in New York discovered that at least one cork supplier was tampering with the product. This employe had been handling a block of Cork that was sold to them by the Non Perel Cork Works of Camden, New Jersey, and something just didn't feel right about it. Breaking Open the block of Cork revealed a six inch long iron bar. It's about fifteen centimeters and it weighed about eight ounces, or more than two grams. So Life preservers were supposed to contain six pounds of Cork, but instead of selling six pound cork blocks, this corkworks was shorting the amount of Cork and making up the difference with iron. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a letter to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor that went along with the federal commission's report. In it he described this as an offense, quote so heinous a character that it is difficult to comment upon it with proper self restraint. It appears that the national legislature has never enacted a law providing in set terms for the punishment of this particular species of infamy, doubtless because it never entered the head of any man that's so gross in infamy could be perpeture e did. Sometimes, when you are reading articles on the Internet about this disaster, it'll say that the life preservers on the slocum had iron bars in them. That does not appear to be the case. This appears to be like the newly made ones that people were using to replace the ones that clearly needed to be replaced. The commission's report was also scathing in terms of the captain and the two pilots and how they had conducted themselves during the fire. As we noted earlier, the Master of the vessel, William h Van Shike, doesn't appear to have evaluated what was happening with the fire or given any orders about fighting it, or issued any instructions about getting the passengers to safety. He and the boat's pilots were all in the pilot house when they learned about the fire. Van Shik ordered the pilots to proceed full speed ahead. He left the pilot house for a moment and then he said, upon returning, that they should beach the boat at North Brother Island. When the boat was beached, he jumped overboard, breaking one of his legs in the process. So van Shaike had failed in multiple duties. That were his responsibility both before and during the accident. He had not ensured that the boat and its life saving and firefighting equipment were up to safety standards. He had not seen to the safety of the passengers, he had not conducted a fire or lifeboat drill that season. He had not fulfilled any of his duties in the actual emergency, which included delegating responsibilities to see to the passenger safety and ensure that they did not panic. The commission also found that Vansheke had multiple opportunities to safely beach the vessel much earlier, but didn't take them, and if he had done so, the fire would have had much less time to spread before people could evacuate. These other possible beaching points included Little Hell Gate and Sunken Meadows, and getting to them would have required the boat to turn sharply to the West. Then the wind would have been blowing across the vessel rather than down its length, which could have helped limit the spread of the fire. Van Shaike maintained that he had learned of the fire too late to beach the ship at any of these other points and that north brother island was their only option. It should also be noted that he stayed at his post in the pilot house even as it burned around him and his clothes caught fire. The commission also found that the lead pilot, Edward l Van Wart, was also at fault for the way the vessel came to rest off north brother island. It had come to rest at such an angle that there was just no way for the passengers to escape safely, and in the commission's opinion, this was either poor judgment or a lack of skill. Compounding all of this, the testimony of the captain and the pilots didn't match up with the timeline that was pieced together from other witnesses. These three men all said the same thing, that they beached the boat off north brother island less than three minutes after being informed of the fire, and north brother island was their only option. But whitness testimony from survivors and from witnesses on other vessels and on shore suggested that the time between when the fire started and the vessel was beached was as long as twenty minutes. Either no one informed the captain of what was happening for more than ten minutes, or the captain and pilots were trying to protect themselves by saying they didn't know about the fire until later, and the investigation also found a lot of other problems as well, including that the ship's mate did not have the required license. It was also noted that the nature of an excursion crowd meant that the passengers themselves really were not equipped to take over and handle things in a crisis. They needed to be in the care of a competent, well trained crew who knew how to keep their safety in mind. And, to quote the report quote, a very important conclusion from this set of facts is that the law and regulations must recognize the fact that an excursion party must be taken care of and cannot take care of itself. Henry Lundbergh was one of the inspectors who had passed the general slocum just before the incident. He was fired from his position and both he and inspector John W Fleming were indicted on charges of fraud, misconduct and inatten into duty. The managing directors of the Knickerbocker steamboat company were indicted as well, but the only person ever convicted of a crime was captain Van Shike, who was convicted of criminal negligence. On January seventh, nineteen O six. He had also faced two charges of manslaughter, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict and those he was sentenced to ten years, including hard labor, which was the maximum sentence allowed. The judge said that he wanted to make an example of him, in part because no one else who clearly was culpable in this was facing any actual trial. Yeah, it's like a carnival of complete inattention to duty. Yeah, like Van Stike clearly made a lot of errors here, but he also was scapegoated for this whole thing. Like he the whole thing got pinned on him when it was a systemic problem at multiple levels. Yeah, there were a lot of balls dropped along the way. Uh, Van Shike was incarcerated at sing sing, but he was paroled after three and a half years. President William Howard Taft pardoned him in nineteen eleven. The families of the victims also received no restitution or compensation. The knickerbocker steamboat companies creditors filed suit, as did survivors and families of the victims and eventually the city of New York. The company asked the court to limit its liability to five thousand dollars, which was the value of the ship after the disaster, and the company also faced enormous criticism for continuing to operate its other vessel, the grand republic, especially when the grand republic was found to have its lifesaving and firefighting equipment in similarly poor repair. The Grand Republic was involved in a series of crashes with other vessels before being destroyed by fire while docked in nineteen twenty four, with the crew safely evacuated. The KNICKERBOCKER steamboat company eventually closed down. In nineteen O six, a memorial fountain was unveiled in Tompkins Square Park. It had been paid for by the Sympathy Society of German ladies. It's described with the words they are the earth's purest children, young and fair. There's also a monument at all faiths cemetery in Queens New York, where sixty one unidentified bodies were buried. Adela Lebaneau, who had been six months old at the time of the disaster, unveiled the statue while she was still a toddler. She was the youngest survivor of the incident, as well as the last living survivor. She died in two thousand four at the age of one hundred. By that time she was Adela Lebaneau weatherspoon. Two of her sisters also died in the disaster, one of whose body was never found. Laws passed after the disaster regulated the excursion boat industry more strictly, including requirements for crew training and equipment maintenance. The disaster has also been noted as one of the inspirations for more formalized life saving programs in the United States and for children to be routinely taught how to swim. It's not totally clear how direct this connection is, though. As the story goes, Wilbert a longfellow of Rhode Island, known as Commodore, was distressed about this disaster, and so he started working with organizations to teach children how to swim. Longfellow was definitely involved in this work, there's no doubt about that at all, but several of its milestones were still a few years off when this slocum happened. In Nine longfellow started working with the American Red Cross to develop water safety and swimming programs. He worked with the Y M C A and the boy scouts in the nineteen teams as well, but it was still some time before it was considered appropriate for women and girls to wear swimsuits that you could actually swim in. That's something that we talked about more in our episode on a Nette Kellerman, hey so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the Archive, if you heard an email address or a facebook U R L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email addressed is history podcas cast at I heart radio DOT COM. Our old house stuff works. Email at us no longer works and you can find us all over social media at missed in history and you can subscribe to our show on apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart radio APP and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed in history class is a production of I heart radio. For more podcasts from I heart radio, visit the IHEART radio APP, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. Our next episodes of the show cover somebody whose life is really just like a whole tour of previous episodes of the show, and one of the historical events that's going to come up on those episodes is the general slocum disaster, so we are bringing that one out as today's Saturday classic. Heads Up, this is probably one of our all time saddest episodes and it originally came out on June. Welcome to stuff you missed in history class. A production of I heart radio. Hello and welcome to the PODCAST. I'm racy B Wilson and I'm holly frying. The PS general slocum burned in the East River in New York on June oh four, so a hundred and fifteen years ago this month, and this disaster has also been a really frequent listener request, including from Kell, Suzanne, Linda, Jesse Torrey and Michael Um. It has some similarities to the east land disaster, which we talked about on the show a couple of years ago. Both of these vessels had been chartered for a group outing that turned into just a deadly maritime disaster very suddenly. Both of these were also topics that I knew from the start we're going to be tragic, but then turned out to be even worse than I imagined them. The Paddle Steamer General Slocum was built in it was named after Henry Warner Slocum of New York, who had served as a general in the Union army during the civil war. The ship was one of two steamers owned by the Knickerbocker steamboat company, the other being the grand republic. It was a large wooden sidewheel steamer with three decks. The General Slocum was licensed to carry up to passengers and when it was first launched it was a modern, luxurious vessel, but by nineteen o four it was really starting to show its age, although it, I'd been regularly repainted over the years, including shortly before the disaster. But it also passed an inspection on May fifth of nineteen o four. The slocum was an excursion boat intended for making short trips around New York's waterways from the spring through the fall. In the early part of the season, people could charter the whole vessel for a flat fee. Starting around the beginning of July. It operated as a ferry on the rockaway route connecting Manhattan, Brooklyn and rockaway on Long Island. For its June fifteenth nineteen o four trip, it had been chartered by St Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church at a cost of three hundred fifty dollars. The church was hosting its annual picnic to celebrate the end of the school year, and most of the people who were attending were church members who lived in Manhattan's lower east side. They lived in a neighborhood known as Klein Deutsch Land, or little Germany, because of a very large population of German immigrants and their descendants who lived there. At the time, this was one of the largest German American community us in the United States. About one thousand three hundred fifty eight passengers were aboard the Slocum on the day of the disaster. The exact number is actually an estimate, since there were tickets for this excursion, but babies didn't need one, and sometimes multiple children were brought aboard on one ticket. Since the picnic was being held on a Wednesday, most of the adult passengers were women. The men and the families were more likely to be at work. Overall, more than half the people aboard were children and only between fifty and one fifty of the passengers were adult men. These passengers were in high spirits, dressed in their Sunday best and prepared for a two hour cruise along the East River from the Third Street recreation pier to the north shore of Long Island. Once they got there, they would spend the day at a picnic ground called Locust Grove. They had food and a bar on the boat, along with entertainment provided by a band that was playing on the promenade deck. Although they embarked generally as families, once people were aboard, parents were totally comfortable letting their children go off on their own and play together. They left the dock between nine thirty and nine forty in the morning. In Command was the captain, William h Van Shaik, with first pilot Edward Van Wort and second pilot Edwin Weaver. Van Shaike had been aboard the General Slocum since its launch and had a reputation for being safe and careful, but he was also in his sixties and the general slocum had been through a number of incidents and accidents over the years, so some people thought that it was maybe time for him to retire. Not long into this journey, a fire started in the forward compartment on the main deck. It's not clear exactly how, because there were just so many possible sources. The forward compartment was being used as both a storage room and a lamp room. Machine Oil for the mechanical systems was stored in the forward compartment as well, along with two bags of charcoal and various rubbish. There were lots of other flammable materials in this wooden compartment, including three open barrels of glassware that we're packed in hey. Those had been brought aboard for the excursion. This was also where a member of the crew filled and maintained the lamps, using a makeshift table made of wooden planks laid over a couple of trestles. In the course of this work, the floor of the compartment had been covered in a thin layer of oil. There had also been an open flame in this room at several points over the course of the morning. The compartment itself had electric lighting, as did other parts of the ship, but that morning the porter who was responsible for filling the lamps had found the room to be very dark, so he had lit one of the lamps using a match. He later testified that he could extinguish the match and he had thrown it down on a bench. Someone else had been working on part of the mechanical system in the room, using an open torch as a light source. People also lit matches and had other open flame in the room for all kinds of reasons, something that was just inherently dangerous given what was in there. Shortly after the fire started, the general slogan was approaching a narrow part of the East River known as Hellgate. About that time a boy noticed smoke coming from near the forward cabin. He told a member of the crew, who apparently thought that the child was playing some kind of prank and told him to mind his business. A few minutes after that, other members of the crew saw smoke coming from the forward cabin and they realized there was a fire and started trying to put it out. The ship's firefighting equipment included a standpipe and hoses. The standpipe and its valves were in good working order, but the hoses were mostly old, cheap linen hoses. Members of the crew attached a piece of this old hose to the valve near the forward compartment and asked the engineering room to send water through the Standpipe, but as soon as the water hit that hose it shattered in multiple places. There were also a couple of newer rubber hoses on the boat and members of the crew got one of those to try again, but they couldn't get that new hose to connect to the standpipe. When they couldn't figure out why, they gave up, and an investigation later revealed that when the hose shattered, it was blown off the coupling that was holding it onto the standpipe, but the coupling itself was still there. In their panic, the crew members didn't realize that the old coupling was still connected, and if they had removed the old coupling, the new pose would have connected with no problem. This was really the last of the cruise effort to try to fight the fire. There were fire buckets on board, but they were empty and they weren't put into use. There are also reports that a hapless crew member dumped a bucket of charcoal onto the fire to try to smother it. That doesn't appear in the Federal Commission's report about the disaster and it's such a far fetched idea that someone would do that that it seems almost unbelievable. At the same time, the way the disaster progressed from here is almost unbelievable, and we're going to talk more about it after we first paused for a little break. After the fire was discovered in the forward compartment of the PS General Slocum, it doesn't appear that the captain, William h Von Shaik, personally assessed what was happening with it or gave any kind of orders to try to get it under control. Instead, he looked at where they were on the river and decided to beach the ship so that people might be able to jump to safety. The nearest land was west of the boat, in the Bronx, but this area was full of stored lumber and gas tanks. Apparently someone warned von Shaike away from it for that reason, or he decided that landing a flaming vessel there would be more dangerous than trying to find another location. The captain ordered the pilots to aim north northeast toward north brother island. This required them to travel at full steam ahead into deep water in the middle of the East River. So the PS general slocum was made almost entirely out of wood. It's middle deck was a promenade deck with that was mostly open to the air, with a smaller enclosed space in the middle. The top deck was a her cane deck that was similarly open to the air, and hurricane decks just get their name from how incredibly windy attempts to be up there. So when the vessel started bearing down toward north brother island, it was full steam ahead against the wind, and the resulting airflow across its structure quickly spread the fire from the forward compartment toward the back of the vessel. When the fire started, the passengers were spread all around the ship. There were more people on the promenade deck than in other passenger areas because that's where the band was and because the fire started in the forward compartment, most of the passengers were behind it. That meant that as the boat picked up speed, the wind was spreading the fire directly toward them very quickly. People started to panic, as various family members had got off to play or socialized. People had become separated from one another, so parents didn't know where their children were and children couldn't find their parents. Also, most of the people aboard could not swim. Swimming hadn't really taken off as a pastime in the United States at this point and clothing suitable for actually swimming was not considered decent for women to wear at all. And, as we said earlier, because this was a nice outing, the people aboard were in their Sunday best. So as the fire spread, people had a choice. They could jump into deep water, weighed down by their clothing, knowing that they could not swim, or they could stay where they were and risk burning to death. The General Slocum did have life preservers aboard, unlike a lot of the other maritime disasters that we've covered on the show, there was a life preserver for every passenger, but these were old. Some of them probably dated back to when the ship was newly built. Their covers were rotten, so when people got them down and tried to use them, some of them just fell completely apart in their hands. Others had intact covers, but the cork inside had rotted into dust. So when people jumped into the water with these on, they just soaked up the water and became incredibly heavy rather than helping people to stay afloat at the same time, though, very few of Slocum's life preservers were put into use. Some passengers, as we said, grabbed a life preserver only for it to fall apart in their hands and then they just gave up on trying to find another one. Also, the crew did almost nothing to help distribute them. One testified at the coroner's inquest that he had put one life preserver onto a person and that was the one that he put on himself. Only about fifty life preservers were definitely used during the disaster, twenty of them on people who drowned while wearing them. The slocum also had lifeboats. The boats themselves were in generally good condition, but they weren't put into use during the disaster either. The crew had never been trained on how to operate them and the mechanisms to lower them had been painted over and were immovable. Some of the lifeboats were even wired down. Even if the crew had been able to move these boats with the ship operating at full steam ahead, they just couldn't have been lowered safely into the water. The timeline of the disaster was pieced together from eyewitness testimony and it took as long as twenty minutes from the time the fire was discovered to the general slocum being beached off north brother island. During that time the fire consumed more and more of the boat and passengers jumped into the water rather than burning to death. Most drowned and some were crushed in the paddle wheels. Then, just as the boat was reaching North Brother Island, the starboard side of the hurricane deck collapsed under the weight of hundreds of passengers, dumping all of them directly into deep water. But beating the vessel off North Brother Island did not allow the rest of the passengers to jump to safety the way that the captain had hoped that it would. The vessel came to rest at an angle with its bowl between ten and twenty ft from the shore. That's between three and six MS, but that put the stern of the boat more like forty to sixty ft from shore, or twelve to eighteen meters. The current there was very fast. The water was way over people's heads and because of the way the fire had spread, almost all the passengers were towards the very stern of the ship, where they had to jump into this deep, fast moving water. It's estimated that between four hundred and six hundred people jumped into the water and drowned after the boat had been beached. North Brother Island was home to a quarantine hospital for people with contagious illnesses, and members of its staff came to the shore to try to assist. Two nearby tug boats, the John L Wade and Walter Tracy, also rendered aid and probably saved the lives of hundreds of people. Two men incarcerated at nearby rikers island compelled a doctor who was working there to take them to the site of the wreck in a rowboat so that they could help with the rescue, and there were people on other boats or boats who rode out from shore who rescued people who had jumped into the water along the way. But even with the prompt assistance of all these people from outside the ship, almost everyone aboard was injured or killed. It was the worst single day disaster in New York until the September eleventh two thousand one terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Roughly a thousand passengers died, and that was more than seventy of the passengers aboard. Only two passengers escaped without injury. Meanwhile, the crew, most of whom did not try to help stop the fire or assist the passengers was almost unscathed. Twenty three of the thirty crew escaped without injury and two were killed. For a while after being beached, the General Slocum stayed in place off north brother island. People who came to help were mostly able to get it extinguished and for a time the number of bodies pulled from the water was relatively small. So a lot of people. We're hopeful that there had been a miraculous recovery of a lot of the folks. But the East River isn't really a river, it's a title estuary that connects New York harbor to the long island sound. Consequently, it experiences regular tides and as the tides rose, it lifted the wreck, which about a mile before coming to rest again off hunt's point, which is north of rikers island. The shifting tides and currents also meant that more and more bodies started washing ashore all along the East River, something that continued for days. By One am on the Sixteenth, seven hundred thirty nine bodies had been recovered and sent to a city morgue, as well as temporary morgues on north brother and rikers islands. This disaster was catastrophic for New York City's German American community and it was also obvious that something had gone colossally unacceptably wrong. We'll get to the disaster's aftermath after another sponsor break. The disaster aboard the PS general slocum was devastating, especially in New York's German American community. At least six hundred families lost someone, and some families only had one surviving member, somebody who had been at work that day instead of on the excursion, who basically came home and found that their whole family had died. Many of the people who survived had serious burns, some of which were disabling. Many had lifelong breathing problems because of smoke inhalation and burns to their lungs. Post traumatic stress disorder wasn't recognized until decades later, but survivors also had ongoing effects on their mental and emotional health. The little Germany neighborhood of the lower east side had started to coalesce in the nineteenth century as people left Europe in the face of famine and unrest. The neighborhood really grew from the eighteen thirties to the eighteen fifties, and in eighteen fifty five it was one of the largest German communities in the world. By nineteen O four, this community had outgrown the lower east side and was starting to expand into other parts of New York. This included people who had been born to that first wave of German immigrants who wanted to get out on their own. So some of the neighborhood's population was already moving else where before this disaster happened. But afterward the neighborhood changed dramatically. People who had lost family members found it too painful and moved away, either to other parts of New York or other cities, or back to Germany. Even for people who weren't really close to any of the families that had been aboard, the sudden deaths of so many children changed the character of the neighborhood enormously. People described it as unnaturally painfully quiet. Soon the Manhattan neighborhood of Yorkville was more associated with the city's German community than the lower east side was. Other communities in New York were affected by the tragedy as well, including neighboring Italian and Jewish neighborhoods, but the lower eastsidnes German Protestant community was by far the hardest hit. St Mark's Lutheran Church also lost much of its congregation. That building still stands today and it was converted into a synagogue in ninety. Naturally, people were outraged by this incredible loss of life. The captain was also hospitalized due to injuries that he sustained in the disaster, and he was arrested while he was still in the hospital. He also received hundreds of threatening letters. People called for investigations into the accident and the steamboat company and the excursion boat industry in general. A coroner's inquest was held about two weeks after the incident and recommended that charges be brought against the president and directors of the Knickerbocker steamboat company, the captain, the company's port captain, John A P S, the ship's mate and the government inspectors who had cleared the boat. The coroner's jury also issued the opinion that the system for inspecting vessels in New York's harbors was not sufficient. Federal Commission was also convened to investigate and they issued a report on October eighth nineteen o four. By that point, the General Slocum's wreckage had been raised from the river and towed to rikers island to be pumped out, and the process, the bodies of eighteen more people were found within the wreck including one lodged in the wheel. The investigation emission personally inspected this wreckage, which was later sold and converted into a barge. That barge thank in New Jersey in nineteen eleven, but that time there was no loss of life. Nearby tugboat rescued the crew, who were the only people on board. The commission's report was scathing and found numerous problems that were not at all unique to the general slocum. To start with, it had been built with minimal attention to fire safety. It had a working standpipe in the event of a fire and it was built with the boilers that required distance from the wooden surfaces. Beyond that, though, fire safety did not seem like it had been a consideration at all. The boat didn't have fireproof bulkheads or any other feature that might slow down or stop the spread of a fire. Instead, it was almost entirely a flammable vessel, covered in layers and layers of flammable paint and varnish. The same was true of most excursion vessels that were in use at the time. The crew also was not trained in fire safety or in what to do in the event of a fire. Crews were supposed to have regular fire drills, but the slocum's crew had not had one in more than a year. Compounding this lack of training was the fact that most of the crew were seasonal workers who had been hired for very low pay. They had very little training or experience and, because they've been seasonally hired, some of them had never experienced a fire drill of any type on any ship. Ever, they were not familiar with basic things like what the ship's fire alarms sounded like or how to put on a life preserver. Another problem was an overall lack of maintenance, with many life preservers and fire hoses literally rotten with age. After the General Slocum disaster, other companies started replacing their worn out, rotten life preservers with new stock, but that uncovered another problem. Compressed blocks of Cork were commonly used to make life preservers. An employee at a life preserver factory in New York discovered that at least one cork supplier was tampering with the product. This employe had been handling a block of Cork that was sold to them by the Non Perel Cork Works of Camden, New Jersey, and something just didn't feel right about it. Breaking Open the block of Cork revealed a six inch long iron bar. It's about fifteen centimeters and it weighed about eight ounces, or more than two grams. So Life preservers were supposed to contain six pounds of Cork, but instead of selling six pound cork blocks, this corkworks was shorting the amount of Cork and making up the difference with iron. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a letter to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor that went along with the federal commission's report. In it he described this as an offense, quote so heinous a character that it is difficult to comment upon it with proper self restraint. It appears that the national legislature has never enacted a law providing in set terms for the punishment of this particular species of infamy, doubtless because it never entered the head of any man that's so gross in infamy could be perpeture e did. Sometimes, when you are reading articles on the Internet about this disaster, it'll say that the life preservers on the slocum had iron bars in them. That does not appear to be the case. This appears to be like the newly made ones that people were using to replace the ones that clearly needed to be replaced. The commission's report was also scathing in terms of the captain and the two pilots and how they had conducted themselves during the fire. As we noted earlier, the Master of the vessel, William h Van Shike, doesn't appear to have evaluated what was happening with the fire or given any orders about fighting it, or issued any instructions about getting the passengers to safety. He and the boat's pilots were all in the pilot house when they learned about the fire. Van Shik ordered the pilots to proceed full speed ahead. He left the pilot house for a moment and then he said, upon returning, that they should beach the boat at North Brother Island. When the boat was beached, he jumped overboard, breaking one of his legs in the process. So van Shaike had failed in multiple duties. That were his responsibility both before and during the accident. He had not ensured that the boat and its life saving and firefighting equipment were up to safety standards. He had not seen to the safety of the passengers, he had not conducted a fire or lifeboat drill that season. He had not fulfilled any of his duties in the actual emergency, which included delegating responsibilities to see to the passenger safety and ensure that they did not panic. The commission also found that Vansheke had multiple opportunities to safely beach the vessel much earlier, but didn't take them, and if he had done so, the fire would have had much less time to spread before people could evacuate. These other possible beaching points included Little Hell Gate and Sunken Meadows, and getting to them would have required the boat to turn sharply to the West. Then the wind would have been blowing across the vessel rather than down its length, which could have helped limit the spread of the fire. Van Shaike maintained that he had learned of the fire too late to beach the ship at any of these other points and that north brother island was their only option. It should also be noted that he stayed at his post in the pilot house even as it burned around him and his clothes caught fire. The commission also found that the lead pilot, Edward l Van Wart, was also at fault for the way the vessel came to rest off north brother island. It had come to rest at such an angle that there was just no way for the passengers to escape safely, and in the commission's opinion, this was either poor judgment or a lack of skill. Compounding all of this, the testimony of the captain and the pilots didn't match up with the timeline that was pieced together from other witnesses. These three men all said the same thing, that they beached the boat off north brother island less than three minutes after being informed of the fire, and north brother island was their only option. But whitness testimony from survivors and from witnesses on other vessels and on shore suggested that the time between when the fire started and the vessel was beached was as long as twenty minutes. Either no one informed the captain of what was happening for more than ten minutes, or the captain and pilots were trying to protect themselves by saying they didn't know about the fire until later, and the investigation also found a lot of other problems as well, including that the ship's mate did not have the required license. It was also noted that the nature of an excursion crowd meant that the passengers themselves really were not equipped to take over and handle things in a crisis. They needed to be in the care of a competent, well trained crew who knew how to keep their safety in mind. And, to quote the report quote, a very important conclusion from this set of facts is that the law and regulations must recognize the fact that an excursion party must be taken care of and cannot take care of itself. Henry Lundbergh was one of the inspectors who had passed the general slocum just before the incident. He was fired from his position and both he and inspector John W Fleming were indicted on charges of fraud, misconduct and inatten into duty. The managing directors of the Knickerbocker steamboat company were indicted as well, but the only person ever convicted of a crime was captain Van Shike, who was convicted of criminal negligence. On January seventh, nineteen O six. He had also faced two charges of manslaughter, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict and those he was sentenced to ten years, including hard labor, which was the maximum sentence allowed. The judge said that he wanted to make an example of him, in part because no one else who clearly was culpable in this was facing any actual trial. Yeah, it's like a carnival of complete inattention to duty. Yeah, like Van Stike clearly made a lot of errors here, but he also was scapegoated for this whole thing. Like he the whole thing got pinned on him when it was a systemic problem at multiple levels. Yeah, there were a lot of balls dropped along the way. Uh, Van Shike was incarcerated at sing sing, but he was paroled after three and a half years. President William Howard Taft pardoned him in nineteen eleven. The families of the victims also received no restitution or compensation. The knickerbocker steamboat companies creditors filed suit, as did survivors and families of the victims and eventually the city of New York. The company asked the court to limit its liability to five thousand dollars, which was the value of the ship after the disaster, and the company also faced enormous criticism for continuing to operate its other vessel, the grand republic, especially when the grand republic was found to have its lifesaving and firefighting equipment in similarly poor repair. The Grand Republic was involved in a series of crashes with other vessels before being destroyed by fire while docked in nineteen twenty four, with the crew safely evacuated. The KNICKERBOCKER steamboat company eventually closed down. In nineteen O six, a memorial fountain was unveiled in Tompkins Square Park. It had been paid for by the Sympathy Society of German ladies. It's described with the words they are the earth's purest children, young and fair. There's also a monument at all faiths cemetery in Queens New York, where sixty one unidentified bodies were buried. Adela Lebaneau, who had been six months old at the time of the disaster, unveiled the statue while she was still a toddler. She was the youngest survivor of the incident, as well as the last living survivor. She died in two thousand four at the age of one hundred. By that time she was Adela Lebaneau weatherspoon. Two of her sisters also died in the disaster, one of whose body was never found. Laws passed after the disaster regulated the excursion boat industry more strictly, including requirements for crew training and equipment maintenance. The disaster has also been noted as one of the inspirations for more formalized life saving programs in the United States and for children to be routinely taught how to swim. It's not totally clear how direct this connection is, though. As the story goes, Wilbert a longfellow of Rhode Island, known as Commodore, was distressed about this disaster, and so he started working with organizations to teach children how to swim. Longfellow was definitely involved in this work, there's no doubt about that at all, but several of its milestones were still a few years off when this slocum happened. In Nine longfellow started working with the American Red Cross to develop water safety and swimming programs. He worked with the Y M C A and the boy scouts in the nineteen teams as well, but it was still some time before it was considered appropriate for women and girls to wear swimsuits that you could actually swim in. That's something that we talked about more in our episode on a Nette Kellerman, hey so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the Archive, if you heard an email address or a facebook U R L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email addressed is history podcas cast at I heart radio DOT COM. Our old house stuff works. Email at us no longer works and you can find us all over social media at missed in history and you can subscribe to our show on apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart radio APP and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed in history class is a production of I heart radio. For more podcasts from I heart radio, visit the IHEART radio APP, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.