Seven Events That Made America America (12 page)

Flooding had cut the Pennsylvania Railroad at Sang Hollow depot, forcing rescuers to unload boxcars of food, blankets, clothes, and even medicine by hand and move them upriver—over rock falls, landslides, through water—on their backs. By the next morning they had successfully transported two carloads. Workers then methodically stretched a rope bridge across the Conemaugh. The Stone Bridge, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad, had not collapsed (it did block debris from drifting further downstream, which later caused a fire that burned thirty of the surrounding acres), and the Pittsburgh supply train arrived Sunday morning from the west, its track restored from Sang Hollow in another astounding feat of determination. It had left at four o’clock Saturday afternoon, when stunned onlookers in Pittsburgh had watched the debris-filled water flow into the Allegheny with its debris and reacted immediately. When the train arrived at the outskirts of Johnstown, men stood in the open doors of its boxcars and tossed bundles of crackers and cheese to those who lined the tracks. Without waiting for a government assessment, both the bedraggled citizens of Johnstown and their fellow Pennsylvanians sixty miles away rolled up their sleeves and addressed the problem.

There was a call to arms, though: at a meeting at one o’clock in Pittsburgh’s Old City Hall, one resident, Robert Pitcairn, implored the attendees, saying, “it is not tomorrow you want to act, but today; thousands of lives were lost in a moment and the living need immediate help.”
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In less than an hour, two men standing at the front of the hall collected over $48,000 (a staggering amount in the 1800s, when a steak dinner cost less than half a dollar). As one reporter put it, there was “no oratory but the eloquence of cash.”
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Pittsburghers then dispatched wagons throughout the city to collect food, blankets, clothing, and tools, depositing the goods at Union Station, which took on the look of a Civil War depot, swarming with people loading the trains. Boats were also ferried up the line, bringing refugees back from across the river where they had been stranded, along with the ever-present army of corpses. People sent anything and everything, and Johnstowners put it all to good use. A steady stream of volunteers arrived from out of town—over a thousand by Sunday night, including fifty undertakers. Pittsburgh sent members of its fire department (who put out the Stone Bridge fire), while the Pennsy ordered in railroad workers.

Perhaps the first semblance of government on the scene came with the arrival of Daniel Hartman Hastings, the state’s adjutant general, who hitched up his wagon on Saturday and watched the developments all day Sunday before speaking to Moxham and the committeemen about calling out the Pennsylvania National Guard. But the Johnstowners thought it best for the residents (and volunteers) to handle their own problems. Moxham thought the work would help people get their minds off the disaster. So when the first troops arrived from Pittsburgh, Hastings instructed them to return home. Even so, everyone began to see the need for help, especially when rumors of looting and brawling spread. Indeed, the news that out-of-town construction workers (such as the Booth and Flinn Construction Company’s workers, who had a reputation for thuggery and theft) were on the way caused much anxiety. Thus, if only to keep order, the committeemen decided to draft a formal request to the governor. But this came only after the rescue and recovery operations had been going on for more than twenty-four hours.

An outpouring of relief, both physical goods and labor, arrived at Johnstown. Clara Barton, who would later receive deserved credit for the young American Red Cross’s efforts to help, arrived three days after the flood ended and would prove invaluable. But the rescuers had already been there for days, and none was more prominent than Captain Bill Jones, Andrew Carnegie’s famous supervisor at the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, who brought three hundred steelmen from Pittsburgh to help in the effort. Jones began his career as a private in the Civil War, gaining promotion to the rank of captain by 1864. He had achieved notoriety when he rejected Carnegie’s standing offer to co-opt talented leaders by making them part owners of his steel company, saying that he was not ownership material. When Carnegie asked what it would take to keep Jones, Jones replied, “A hell of a big raise.”
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Carnegie asked him for a number, and after he gave it to him Carnegie thought the amount—$15,000—was too low. Instead, Carnegie paid him $25,000—the salary of the president of the United States—making Jones one of the most highly paid managers in America. A master motivator, Jones knew how to organize, and above all he knew how to work. He paid out of his own pocket to stock a relief train, then labored for four straight days without rest until he was on the point of collapse. Just after Barton and her Red Cross showed up, Jones, exhausted, returned to Pittsburgh for sleep, praising the men who worked with him (particularly a group of Hungarians, who had been accused of looting), saying they “worked like heroes.”
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Bill Jones died just a few months after the flood when a blast furnace exploded in the Carnegie Steel plant.

By June 6 and 7, thousands of pounds of coffee, ham, cornmeal, soap, canned goods, cheese, biscuits, and candles were being unloaded by the hour from trains. Tar, pitch, building supplies of all sorts, furniture, and even embalming fluid and quicklime for the dead bodies all flowed into Johnstown. Cincinnati meat packers shipped 20,000 pounds of ham, and a single New York butcher sent 150 pounds of bologna; Pennsylvania prison inmates bagged 1,000 loaves of bread; Wheeling, West Virginia, residents shipped a boxcar-load of nails. Commissaries scattered around town were so well stocked that all fears of food shortages had vanished by midweek. Mattresses, cots, blankets, tents, pillows, coffeepots, pipes, and over 7,000 pairs of shoes arrived, piling so high on the platforms that they obscured the trains. Enough tools came in that no worker had a reason to sit idle. Animal carcasses were thrown onto any of a dozen bonfires; graves with quicklime consumed the human dead; live plow teams pulled away debris.

Then there was the money, which was generated by newspaper accounts, pictures, and even songs of the tragedy. Pittsburgh raised $100,000 in a week, and over half a million dollars total over a few weeks. Philadelphia sent $600,000; New York, $160,000; Boston, $150,000. Boxer Jake Kilrain, scheduled to fight John L. Sullivan for the world championship a few weeks later, fought an exhibition to raise Johnstown relief funds. The New York Metropolitan Opera produced a relief performance of
Othello
, and Buffalo Bill Cody, in Paris at the time, donated the earnings from a special show attended by the Prince of Wales. Bandleader and composer John Philip Sousa staged a special relief concert in Washington, D.C. Money streamed into Johnstown from everywhere, including Tiffany’s and Macy’s in New York City, donors in Tombstone, Arizona, and the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles.

President Benjamin Harrison kicked in $300 of his own money, but he also made an appeal at a meeting at the Willard Hotel that proved so emotional it raised $10,000. Pennsylvania Republican boss Simon Cameron, known for his corruption and his comment that an honest politician is one who “when he is bought, stays bought,” wrote a check for $1,000. Help came from abroad too. The Irish cities of Belfast and Dublin sent money, while German donations exceeded $30,000. (Funds came from a total of fourteen foreign countries.) Total monetary contributions exceeded $3.6 million.

Others joined Jones on the scene, including H. C. Tarr of the Utopia Embalming Fluid Company, who rode two hundred miles on horseback to help take care of the bodies. Half a dozen Philadelphia churches organized wagons of medical supplies. Thousands of preachers, doctors, and, of course, the usual retinue of adventurers, thieves, and the unemployed also descended on the struggling town. Billy Flinn’s construction crews, totaling roughly 1,000 men (“very few Americans among them,” according to one reporter) marched in, accompanied by four more relief trains.
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More than 7,000 outsiders came to work in Johnstown, and indeed, the appearance of so many new faces and rough men began to frighten the residents, thus leading Moxham to request National Guard troops to keep order. On Wednesday, Hastings called for an additional 500 men from Pittsburgh’s Fourteenth Regiment, who were brought in strictly to act as security.

This was no small point: private philanthropy and local citizens had dealt with the “relief” efforts without the intrusion of even the state—let alone the federal—government. But the constitutional duty to protect life and secure property from pillaging had forced the federal government to send national guardsmen, an act completely in its power under the “general welfare” clause. Even before the army showed up, however, according to McCullough, “things were exceptionally well organized.”
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The Red Cross established its reputation at Johnstown, despite arriving late to the cleanup process. Barton, then sixty-seven years old, came from Washington with a delegation of fifty doctors and nurses. Perhaps because of her frail appearance, Barton got a lot of attention from reporters. She also realized the importance of publicity for her organization and recognized that, while the Red Cross had worked in Illinois after a tornado and in Florida after a yellow fever epidemic, Johnstown presented a disaster of unprecedented magnitude. Yet Barton worked well with Hastings, who was taken aback by her aggressiveness (“the gallant soldier could not have been more courteous and kind,” she said, but “I could not have puzzled General Hastings more if I had addressed him in Chinese”).
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She soon had six two-story Red Cross hospitals up and running, with volunteers working around the clock, and as one of the most recognizable figures in Johnstown, Barton served to rally the workers and encourage the victims.

Less than two decades after the Johnstown Flood, Ohio’s Miami Valley experienced a similar, though much less disastrous, flood. The hero of this story, John H. Patterson, could not have had less in common with Captain Bill Jones. Patterson was an industrialist of the first order who headed the powerful National Cash Register Company (NCR) in Dayton. Early in 1913, a federal judge had found Patterson and other company officers guilty of antitrust violations and sentenced most of them to prison time (Patterson was sentenced to a year in the hoosegow, although the sentences were overturned on appeal). Only a few months after the sentences were handed down, a massive rainstorm hit Ohio, and by March, the rainfall levels had eclipsed anything the Weather Bureau had recorded. It rained for forty-eight hours straight at heavy levels, with the water pouring into the Miami River, as well as the Mad River. Flooding began on the Monday after Easter in the northern towns around Dayton, and although the levees held for a time, the Mad River levee broke on Tuesday morning, March 25, sending its contents into the Miami and Erie Canal. Within minutes, the floods surged over the canal banks and covered Dayton’s streets with five feet of water.

The deluge struck before businesses and schools had opened, but the floodwaters soon reached residential areas, speeding in at 250,000 feet per second and reaching a depth of up to 14 feet in some places.
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Compromised by the additional volume, other levees, including the town of Hamilton’s, failed. As it usually does, damage from the flood soon produced fires, and people who had scrambled into the upper stories of apartment houses found themselves trapped by flames. By the time snow and more rain fell that night and helped put out the fires, over three hundred Daytonians were dead and property damage was over $1 million.
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One Dayton resident watched “houses and barns . . . torn from their foundations and float[ing] down Vine Street,” and could only helplessly look on as an old man on a makeshift raft was swept away by the current.
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Historian Judith Sealander, who chronicled the event, noted, “that several hundred rather than several thousand died was something for which the city’s business community, led by John H. Patterson and the NCR, deserved a large measure of credit.”
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Patterson had written a pamphlet in 1896 called “What Dayton, Ohio, Should Do to Become a Model City,” incorporating typical progressive views of the day regarding the importation of “experts” to handle specific functions. But it also involved applying business methods and common sense to city problems.

Governor (and future presidential candidate) James Cox placed the city under martial law on March 27, but by that time Patterson had already organized the relief, even taking command over elected leaders such as Mayor Edward Phillips. Part of local government’s problem consisted of the fact that city hall was under water almost immediately. Nevertheless, the successful, efficient, and relatively quick disaster response and crisis management by the private sector “set a pattern that was followed for years,” noted Sealander:

By 1913, these business leaders, who had formed the “Committee of One Hundred” in 1889 to pave the streets, install sewers, and develop green spaces, consistently viewed the government as part of the problem. Whether federal or state, governments, they felt, imposed unnecessary delays, represented bottlenecks, and were consistently behind the curve. While the unelected Patterson organized the recovery, setting up NCR as an emergency headquarters, the mayor and the city council—none of whom were injured—meekly asked only to be notified of decisions. Indeed, many residents thought the mayor had drowned, so irrelevant was his role in the relief effort. Governor Cox’s role was hardly more impressive, limited mostly to calling for relief from the secretary of war. Woodrow Wilson asked people to donate to the Red Cross. The Navy managed to arrive in Dayton from Louisville, adding experienced sailors to the boat rescues, but not for days after local Daytonians had already pulled out most of the desperate cases.