The Johnstown Flood (30 page)

The plain fact was that no one who was interviewed had anything good to say about the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, its members, or its dam. And when a coroner’s jury from Greensburg, in Westmoreland County, showed up soon after the reporters, the local people willingly repeated the same things all over again.

The jurymen had come to investigate the cause of death of the 121 bodies that had been recovered at Nineveh, which was just across the line in Westmoreland County. They poked about the ruins of the dam, talked to people, made notes, and went home. The formal investigation, with witnesses testifying under oath, was to be held on Wednesday, the 5th.

In the meantime, Mr. H. W. Brinkerhoff of
Engineering and Building Record,
a professional journal published in New York, arrived in South Fork to take a look at the dam and was soon joined by A. M. Wellington and F. B. Burt, editors of
Engineering News.
Most of the reporters remained cautious about passing judgment on the dam, waiting to see what the experts had to say. But on June 5 the headline on the front page of the New York
Sun
read:

CAUSE OF THE CALAMITY

The Pittsburgh Fishing Club
Chiefly Responsible

The Waste Gates Closed
When the Club Took
Possession

The indictment which followed, based on a
Sun
reporter’s “personal investigation,” could not have been much more bluntly worded.

In Johnstown on the same day, General Hastings told a
World
correspondent that in his view, “It was a piece of carelessness, I might say criminal negligence.” In Greensburg the Westmoreland coroner’s jury began listening to one witness after another testify to the shoddy way the dam had been rebuilt and the fear it had engendered, though two key witnesses had apparently had second thoughts about speaking their minds quite so publicly and refused to appear until forced to do so by the sheriff.

Two days later, on the 7th, a verdict was issued: “…death by violence due to the flood caused by the breaking of the dam of the South Fork Reservoir…” It seemed a comparatively mild statement, considering the talk there had been and coming as it did on the same day as Hastings’ pronouncement. But on the preceding day, another cornoner’s inquest, this one conducted by Cambria County, had rendered a decision that spelled out the cause of the disaster, and fixed the blame, in no uncertain terms.

The Cambria jurors had also visited the dam and listened to dozens of witnesses. But their inquest was held to determine the death of just one flood victim, a Mrs. Ellen Hite. Their verdict was “death by drowning” and that the drowning was “caused by the breaking of the South Fork dam.”

But then the following statement was added:

“We further find, from the testimony and what we saw on the ground that there was not sufficient water weir, nor was the dam constructed sufficiently strong nor of the proper material to withstand the overflow; and hence we find the owners of said dam were culpable in not making it as secure as it should have been, especially in view of the fact that a population of many thousands were in the valley below; and we hold that the owners are responsible for the fearful loss of life and property resulting from the breaking of the dam.”

Now the story broke wide open. “THE CLUB IS GUILTY” ran the
World’s
headline on June 7. “Neglect Caused the Break…Shall the Officers of the Fishing Club Answer for the Terrible Results.”

The Cincinnati
Enquirer
said that in Johnstown, as more facts became known, the excitement was reaching a “fever heat” and that “it would not do for any of the club members to visit the Conemaugh Valley just now.” The Chicago
Herald
said there was “no question whatever” as to the fact that criminal negligence was involved.

Although it would be another week before the engineering journals would publish their reports on the dam, the gist of their editors’ conclusions had by now leaked to the press. On Sunday, the 9th,
The New York Times
headline ran:

An Engineering Crime

The Dam of Inferior Construction

According to the Experts

Actually, the engineering journals never worded it quite that way. The full report which appeared in the issue of
Engineering News
dated June 15 said that the original dam had been “thoroughly well built,” but that contrary to a number of previously published descriptions, it had not been constructed with a solid masonry core. (From this some newspapers would conclude that the “death-dealer” was nothing but a “mud-pile.”) The repairs made by Benjamin Ruff, however, had been carried out “with slight care,” according to the report. Most important of all, there had been “no careful ramming in watered layers, as in the first dam.” But Ruff’s work was not the real issue, according to the editors. “Negligence in the mere execution of the earthwork, however, if it existed, is of minor importance, since there is no doubt that it was not a primary cause of the disaster; at worst, it merely aggravated it.”

The primary causes, it was then stated, were the lowering of the crest, the central sag in the crest, the fact that there were no outlet pipes at the base, and the obstruction of the spillway. The details of these matters were carefully described, and it was speculated that the disaster might have been averted that Friday afternoon if the bridge over the spillway and the fish guards had been cut away in time, or if some “man of great resolution, self-confidence, and self-sacrifice” had (as John Parke had contemplated) cut the dam at one end, where the original and more firmly built surface would have held up better against the enormous force of erosion.

But the point the editors of the report seemed most determined to hammer home was that there was no truth to any claims being made that the dam had been rebuilt by qualified engineers.

“In fact, our information is positive, direct, and unimpeachable that at
no time during the process of rebuilding the dam was
ANY ENGINEER WHATEVER, young or old, good or bad, known or unknown, engaged or consulted as to the work,—a fact which will be hailed by engineers everywhere with great satisfaction, as relieving them as a body from a heavy burden of suspicion and reproach.”

Moreover, contrary to some statements made in Pittsburgh since the disaster, they had found no evidence that the dam had ever been “inspected” periodically, occasionally, or even once, by anyone “who, by any stretch of charity, could be regarded as an expert.”

In other words, the job had been botched by amateurs. That they had been very rich and powerful amateurs was not considered relevant by the engineering journals, but so far as the newspapers were concerned that was to be the very heart of the matter. It was great wealth which now stood condemned, not technology.

The club had been condemned by the coroners’ juries, General Hastings,
and
by the engineering experts. The newspapers made no effort to investigate the dam themselves, and only one or two made any effort to present the facts about the dam or to explain even in passing why it had failed. Nor did the editorial writers make an effort to remain even moderately objective until more information became available. The club was guilty, criminally guilty several papers were saying, and that was that. Unlike the Hungarian stories, this one, it seemed, would hold up. It was based on about as solid information as could be hoped for, and in terms of its emotional content, it was perhaps even stronger. Now across the country there arose a great howl of righteous indignation.

For everyone who had been asking how such a calamity could possibly happen in the United States of America, there now appeared to be an answer, and it struck at the core of something which had been eating at people for some time, something most of them had as yet no name for, but something deeply disturbing.

For despite the progress being made everywhere, despite the growing prosperity and the prospect of an even more abundant future, there were in 1889 strong feelings that perhaps not all was right with the Republic. And if the poor Hungarians of Johnstown were signs of a time to come when a “hunky” could get a job quicker than a “real American,” then the gentlemen of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were signs of something else that was perhaps even worse. Was it not the likes of them that were bringing in the hunkies, buying legislatures, cutting wages, and getting a great deal richer than was right or good for any mortal man in a free, democratic country? Old-timers said that with every gain they made people were losing something. If that was so, people were beginning to think a little more about just what it was they might be losing, and to whom. And the more they thought about it, and especially the workingmen, the less they liked it.

It would be another three years before this kind of feeling would burst out in the terrible violence of the Homestead steel strike in Pittsburgh and Henry Clay Frick would nearly die of a bullet in his neck. And it would be another several years after that before public indignation over the power of the trusts, the giant corporations, and the men who ran them would erupt into public outrage. But the feeling was there in 1889, and it ran a great deal deeper than most people would have supposed. Certainly the language used by the press reflected a level of scorn and bitterness that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was now described as “the most exclusive resort in America,” and its members were referred to as millionaries, aristocrats, or nabobs. According to the Cincinnati
Enquirer
not even vast wealth was enough to gain admission, unless it was hereditary. “Millionaries who did not satisfy every member of the club might cry in vain for admission,” the
Enquirer
wrote. “No amount of money could secure permission to stop overnight at the club’s hotel…” The paper said that no one could visit the club without a permit, and called it “holy ground consecrated to pleasure by capital,” but added that no one would want to go there now, “except to gaze a moment at
the Desolate Monument to the Selfishness of Man…”
J. J. McLaurin, the Harrisburg newspaperman, who was otherwise relatively reliable in his reporting on the disaster, wrote: “The club was excessively aristocratic, and so exclusive that Tuxedo itself might pronounce the Lorillard ideal a failure. The wealthy members never deigned to recognize the existence of the common clay of the neighborhood, farther than to warn intruders to keep off the premises.”

Like dozens of others, McLaurin was also infuriated over the idea that the lake had served as a summer resort. He wrote that “50,000 lives in Pennsylvania were jeopardized for eight years that a club of rich pleasure-seekers might fish and sail and revel in luxurious ease during the heated term.”

For an age which by no means looked upon pleasure as something to be expected in life, let alone life’s chief objective, the very fact that the lake had been put there solely for pleasure seemed almost more than anyone could take; and in several editorials the writers seemed to imply that if the lake had served some other purpose, some
practical
purpose, then the tragedy would not have been quite so distressing.

“It is an aggravation of the calamity to reflect that the reservoir which gave way served no useful purpose, but merely ministered to the amusement of a gentleman’s club composed of millionaires,” wrote a small-town newspaper in New England. “The dam served no useful end, beyond the pleasure of a few rich men,” said the
Daily Graphic
in New York. And the Chicago
Herald
published a cartoon showing what were supposedly seven clubmen done up in loud-checked coats and diamond stickpins, tossing down champagne on the clubhouse porch, while in the valley below them Johnstown is being wiped out.

Like several other papers, the
Herald
likened the clubmen to the Romans. “These wealthy sportsmen, these pleasure-seekers, sat in a secure place, in the amphitheater, like the noble Roman spectators when they gave the signal when the wild beasts were to be admitted into the arena to rend the bodies of the human victims. The Pittsburgh pagans did not give the signal, but they were just as guilty in the fact that they were told that the massacre was about to occur and made no effort to stop it…”

The effort alluded to here was the failure to remove the fish guards, which, very quickly, had come to symbolize everything repellent about the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. “…To preserve game for some Pittsburgh swells the lives of fifteen thousand were sacrificed,” wrote the
Herald.
“…The ghosts of Johnstown are the ghosts of American labor that is dead.” And a man by the name of Isaac Reed wrote a widely quoted poem which opened with the lines:

Many thousand human lives—

Butchered husbands, slaughtered wives,

Mangled daughters, bleeding sons,

Hosts of martyred little ones,

(Worse than Herod’s awful crime)

Sent to heaven before their time;

Lovers burnt and sweethearts drowned,

Darlings lost but never found!

All the horrors that hell could wish,

Such was the price that was paid for—fish!

Interestingly, for all the abuse that was flung at the Pittsburgh people, very few newspapers ever went so far as to mention any specific names of members, and those that did mentioned only a half dozen or so. The Philadelphia
Press,
for all its superb coverage of what was going on in Johnstown, said hardly a word about the club or its members, and perhaps, as was hinted by another paper, because one club member, Calvin Wells, was a major stockholder in the
Press.