The centennial of the General Slocum disaster of June 15, 1904 provides an opportunity to ask a probing question: how was it that a disaster which claimed the lives of 1,021 people in the nation’s largest metropolis became an all-but-forgotten footnote to history?  This question, apart from the extraordinary drama of the story itself, drove me to learn more about the General Slocum disaster and eventually to write a book about it.  It was one of the deadliest fires in American history and by far the nation’s most deadly peacetime maritime disaster.  It was also New York’s deadliest day before September 11, 2001.  Yet whenever I asked anyone to name New York City’s worst calamity, I invariably got the same answer: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. That was a terrible tragedy, to be sure, but one that claimed far fewer lives (146) than the Slocum.  How did a disaster of such magnitude fade so rapidly and so completely from public memory? 

     The story of the General Slocum tragedy begins in the thriving German neighborhood known as Kleindeutchland, or Little Germany.  Located on the Lower East Side in what is today called the East Village, Little Germany had been home to New York’s German immigrant population since they first began arriving in large numbers in the 1840s.  With more than 60,000 Germans living there by the 1870s, the neighborhood lived up to its name.  German fraternal societies, athletic clubs, theaters, bookshops, and restaurants and beer gardens abounded.  So too did synagogues and churches. 

     One of those churches, St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran church on East 6th Street, held an annual outing to celebrate the end of the Sunday school year.  They usually chartered an excursion boat to take them to a nearby recreation spot for a day of swimming, games, and food.  It was a day many looked forward to all year long, for few working-class New Yorkers could hope to escape the oppressive summer heat more than a handful of times a year.

      June 15, 1904, the day of the seventeenth annual St. Mark’s outing, dawned a beautiful spring day without the slightest premonition of disaster.  While most of New York City’s four million residents that Wednesday morning went about their daily routines, the members of St. Mark’s prepared for a rare day of fun and sun on Long Island Sound.  Half the fun would be the journey to and from the picnic grounds aboard the steamer General Slocum. 

     Only minutes into the trip, however, smoke began billowing from a storage room in the forward section of the boat.  Untrained in fire fighting or emergency procedures, the crew put up only a token effort to fight the fire.  Within minutes of its discovery, the blaze raged out of control, growing more ferocious by the second as the speeding vessel fed it more and more oxygen and the hull proved especially flammable.  As panic erupted among the passengers, few of whom could swim, they tumbled overboard by the dozens.  Those who found life preservers discovered to their horror that they were useless – rotten after thirteen years of exposure to the elements.  Passengers who donned them sank like stones.  By the time Captain William Van Schaick beached the floating inferno on North Brother Island just off the Bronx shore, 1,021 had perished, most by drowning. 

     With more than 1,300 people on the outing, nearly everyone in the neighborhood knew someone on the ship.  As word of the fire spread, it caused panic and confusion.  No one seemed to know where to go.  Thousands gathered at St. Mark’s Church awaiting word about survivors.  Thousands more rushed uptown to the East 26th Street pier designated as a temporary morgue.  By mid-afternoon, those not yet reunited with their family members began to lose hope.  Many discovered they had lost a wife or child.  Dozens learned they had lost their entire families.

     The disaster shocked the nation and made headlines around the globe.  World leaders and European royalty sent money and letters of condolence to Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. and the people of St. Mark’s.  Funds poured in from private citizens and charitable groups from Rhode Island to California. 

     The tragedy also provoked widespread public outrage as survivors told of incompetent crewmen, useless fire hoses and rotten life preservers and questioned why the captain took so long to bring the steamer ashore.  City officials launched an immediate investigation and within weeks, Captain Van Schaick, executives of the Knickerbocker Steamship Co. (owner of the General Slocum), and the government inspector who certified the steamer as safe only a month before the fire were indicted for manslaughter. 

     With corporate liability still an emerging concept in the eyes of the courts in 1904, the subsequent trials produced only one conviction.  A convenient scapegoat, the Slocum’s captain was convicted of criminal negligence and manslaughter and sentenced to ten years hard labor in the Sing Sing prison (he served three years before receiving a pardon from President William H. Taft).  Frank A. Barnaby, President of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company and the man who knowingly allowed the operation of the unsafe vessel, and the rest went free, a result that compounded the suffering of those affected by the fire. 

     The General Slocum tragedy left a lasting mark on New York City.  Most dramatically, it reshaped the city’s ethnic map, causing the rapid dissolution of the Little Germany enclave.  To be sure, the trend was already well under way long before 1904, but the disaster prompted a rapid acceleration as survivors and relatives of victims were unwilling to remain in a neighborhood suffused by tragedy.  By the time of the 1910 census, only a handful of German families remained.  The disaster, not unlike the Triangle Fire, also brought about a major upgrading of steamboat safety regulations and a sweeping reform of the United States Steamboat Inspection Service (USSIS).  It also left behind thousands of people condemned to a life of heartbreaking loss and terrifying memories.

     Nonetheless and quite remarkably, the Slocum tragedy rapidly faded from public memory, to the point that it was replaced as the city’s great fire only seven years later when the Triangle Shirtwaist factory burned.  There were similarities between the two fires – both involved immigrants and mostly female victims and both aroused public wrath over callous corporate negligence.  But the Triangle fire’s death toll was 85% lower than the Slocum.   How then did it come to supplant the Slocum tragedy as the fire of fires in New York’s (and the nation’s) memory? 
Several factors begin to explain this remarkable legacy.  First, there was the context.  The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire occurred at a time of intense labor struggle, especially in the garment trades.  Only a year before tens of thousands of shirtwaist makers had staged a huge strike for better wages, hours and conditions.  Now 146 of them lay dead and there was no question as to who was to blame.  This conclusion was reinforced when the public learned that the factory owners had locked the exits to keep the women at their machines, an act that seemed more sinister and nakedly greedy than cutting corners with safety equipment as with the owners of the Slocum. 

     Additionally, the Slocum disaster was, in the words of several newspaper reporters at the time, a "concentrated tragedy."  The great majority of those killed were from a single parish and lived within a forty-block area.  Their fellow New Yorkers were horrified and outraged by the tragedy, but only a relative handful were directly affected. 
The onset of World War I likewise contributed to the forgetting process.  Rabid anti-German sentiment across the country eradicated public sympathy for anything German, including the innocent victims of the General Slocum fire.  Newspaper articles covering the annual June 15 memorial services ceased abruptly in 1914 and did not reappear until 1920.  By then the Triangle fire was fast achieving iconic status as the city’s, even America’s, most famous and memorable fire. 

     Finally, we must consider Gotham’s relentless pursuit of all that is new, an ethos for which it is so famous.  Nowhere in America (and arguably the world), either in 1904 or 2004, does one find a society more focused on the present and future.  “The present in New York is so powerful,” writer John Jay Chapman noted at the turn of the century, “that the past is lost.”  Or as Tammany legend Big Tim Sullivan quipped at about the same time, “New York is a nine day town.”  No story, no matter how big, remains in the public consciousness for very long.  Indeed, if one surveys the city’s four centuries of history, only a handful of traumatic events are well known, chief among them the Draft Riot of 1863 and the Triangle Fire of 1911.  This seems to be the very nature of modern urban society – with so many people struggling to get ahead, they are collectively unwilling or unable to dwell on the setbacks.  Perhaps, then, the real question is not why the Slocum fire is so little known, but why the Triangle Fire has been raised to such mythical status.

     Whatever the ultimate explanation for the forgetting of the General Slocum story, it never quite disappeared entirely.  Now and again it resurfaced, usually in the aftermath of a succeeding catastrophe like the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912.  In 1922, the story achieved a bit of immortality when James Joyce included a half-page reference to it in his monumental work, Ulysses (the novel is set in a single day, June 16, 1904, the day following the Slocum horror).  The Slocum story gained a different sort of immortality in 1934 when it was splashed upon the silver screens all across America in, “Manhattan Melodrama.”   The film opened with a stunning re-enactment of the fire as a set up for a story about the lives of two east side boys (played by William Powell and Clark Gable) orphaned by the disaster.  In 1954 the New-York Historical Society mounted a small 50th anniversary exhibit about the Slocum fire that attracted a small bit of media attention. 

     For nearly the next five decades, save for the occasional story about one of the annual June 15 memorial services, the Slocum disaster retreated further and further into the recesses of public memory.  The release of the 1997 blockbuster film, “Titanic,” and the discovery of the Slocum wreck by internationally recognized diver and writer Clive Cussler in 2000 produced a spate of stories and references to the story. 
But it was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 that brought renewed interest in the Slocum story.  Ultimately, the two events were quite different.  One was a willful act of destruction and murder akin to a military strike except that the victims were all civilians.  The other was a tragedy born of negligence, greed, and just plain bad luck.  Still, there were many parallels worth noting.  The most obvious was the profound shock and horror felt by the people of New York, especially those who lost loved ones.  No tragedy in the city's 400-year history comes close to the carnage of these two events and none produced a greater outpouring of sympathy and sorrow.  Another obvious parallel was the selfless heroism exhibited both by uniformed personnel and everyday people on the scenes.  Although no rescuers died in the Slocum fire, many risked their lives so that others might live.  Such was the case on a larger scale and with more dire consequences on 9/11.
 
     A final parallel between the catastrophes of 1904 and 2001 concerns the effort to build fitting memorials to the victims.  Two memorials were constructed in the wake of the Slocum tragedy, the monument in the Lutheran cemetery unveiled in 1905 and a small fountain placed in Tompkins Square Park (in Little Germany) in 1906.  A much grander public memorial to honor the victims of 9/11 is planned for the site of the World Trade Center towers. 

      Behind these and all similar initiatives lies a three-fold goal: to honor the dead, provide the living with a place of contemplation and remembrance, and ensure that society never forgets what happened.  Yet as the Slocum survivors discovered, as will some day the descendants of 9/11 victims, all three are honorable goals, but only the first two are ultimately achievable.  Monuments can keep alive the historical memory of events like the Johnstown Flood, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 for centuries to come.  The actual memory of these and other traumatic events like the Slocum fire, however, live on only in the hearts and minds of those who experienced them.  They are not transferable -- despite the best efforts of survivors and descendants -- from one generation to the next.  Given the fact that the only real memory of the Slocum fire resides with the last living survivor, 100-year old Adella Liebenow Wotherspoon of Watchung, NJ, it is only a matter of time before the tragedy of the steamboat General Slocum ceases to be remembered in any real way.  Then it will exist for succeeding generations not as a memory, but rather as a cautionary tale of greed and carelessness and a story unspeakable loss and extraordinary courage.