American History Tellers - Boston Molasses Disaster | The Legend and the Legacy | 2

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

The 1919 Molasses Flood was a terrifying and telling moment in the history of Boston’s North End. It was also a snapshot of a developing city in the wake of the first World War. Jake Sconyers explored the events for HUB History, a podcast that revisits stories from Boston’s past. Today, he joins Lindsay to discuss the working class Italian immigrant neighborhood where the disaster happened, how the disaster impacted the community, and the mythology of the Great Molasses Flood today. Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersSupport us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's April 28th, 1925 in downtown Boston. You're a 45-year-old former resident of the North End and one of the survivors of the deadly molasses flood six years ago. Today, you're sitting in a nearly empty cafe across from the Superior Court, awaiting the outcome of the hearings that will determine who is to blame for the disaster. Memories of that terrible day still haunt you. You barely survived the flood, clawing your way out of the debris and rescuing your younger sister. But your house was destroyed and your mother was killed. You lost your brother, too. He survived the flood, but was never the same after. He died less than a year later. One of the lawyers from the case

rushes into the cafe and scans the room. He makes eye contact and approaches your table. There you are. I've been looking all over for you. Have a seat. I'm sorry Mr. Dolan couldn't be here himself. He's busy speaking with reporters. Yeah, I know. It's a circus out there. Came in here to get away from it all. After waiting for so long, I'm about ready for it to be over. Well, I think it was worth the wait. The judge's findings were in our favor. He found the company at fault for the collapse of the tank, all of it. Look here, look. He says no inspection was made of the tank by any architect, engineer, or other person familiar with steel construction between the time it was completed and the date of the collapse. That's four years. Not a single expert on site.

And the whole neighborhood knew it was leaking. Yeah, the entire time. If only they'd done something. Someone would have said something. But see, that's just it. Their own employees did say something. Often. They were warned about the leaks the whole time. And the explosion? The company said it was a bomb. Judge Odgen was even clearer about that. No evidence of a bomb at all. You sit back in your chair, absorbing the news. You feel relief, but also a familiar wave of anger. You try to swallow it down. All right, well, it is good news, but what now? Well, the judge has awarded the victims compensation. You and your sister will both receive damages from the company.

And for your mother and your house as well. He singled that out. And Stephen, my brother? No, I'm sorry, the judge did not include him. That's a disgrace. That flood killed him as surely as if he drowned in it. At the asylum, he just fell apart. I watched it happen.

That's just not how the judge saw it. And Teresa, she barely leaves the house. She shakes and trembles. I tell you, the flood changed us all. Well, if there is another way, we could call for a jury trial. With Judge Ogden's report, we'd have a strong case. Well, then that's what we should do. But there's a risk, too. You should be aware. If we go to trial, the company could reverse this. They still have a team of lawyers and paid experts. They made millions in the war from that damn molasses. And we're the ones who paid for it. We should still fight.

The lawyer nods and rises from his seat. He's got other families to talk with and to decide what to do next. But at least you said your piece. Before the flood, you had high hopes for you and your family. Your business was thriving and you had dreams of moving across town altogether. All of that is gone. The disaster not only destroyed your home and took away your possessions, it shattered your family. You're determined to win justice. Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers.

Our history, your story. Martin Clowardy's family was devastated by the Molasses Flood. His 65-year-old mother was killed, and their wooden house was destroyed. His sister Teresa and brother Stephen both survived the day of the flood, but his brother's mental and physical health quickly deteriorated. He died in the Boston State Hospital for the Insane, 11 months after the flood, plagued by paranoia and nightmares. After Judge Hugh Odgen issued his damning report to the Superior Court, lawyers for Clowardy and other victims of the flood threatened to take the company that had owned the molasses tank to a jury trial. Instead, the company quickly settled out of court, agreeing to award victims double the amount of damages recommended by Judge Ogden. It was a significant win at the time,

helping to set a legal precedent for corporate accountability and leading to stronger building and safety codes throughout the country. My guest today is Jake Sconiers, the founder and host of the podcast Hub History, one that looks at interesting stories from Boston's past. He joins us to discuss the history of Boston's North End, the neighborhood devastated by the flood, as well as the molasses company's attempt to implicate anarchists in the tank's collapse. Here's our conversation. Jake Sconiers, welcome to American History Tellers. Hey, thanks for having me.

So we described this event in our series as one of the strangest disasters in American history. And that's likely because of the material in question, molasses. We usually bake with it, but what was it being used for that required a storage tank of the millions of gallons in Boston? Yeah, molasses, going back to the very earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was central to our Boston economy. We didn't really have farm fields that you could produce much food from, so we had salt cod going to the Caribbean being exchanged for sugar in the form of molasses, which of course was being raised by enslaved Africans. And for the longest time, its primary use was for producing rum. By the time 1919 rolls around, it's being used in the World War I buildup for a solvent, and it's being used

in munitions for a lot of different processes. So it's being refined from molasses into basically ethanol, and then used in different industrial processes for that. Now, this tank was located in Boston's North End neighborhood, which has always been sort of a neighborhood in transition. Who lived there in 1919 when the disaster happened? In 1919, it's sort of the 19-teens and 20s. The north end of Boston was just earning its reputation as Boston's Little Italy. Often, whole families would live in one or two rooms. These reports sort of aghast city officials saying that these little basement rooms where families can't even stand upright and they're packed in four and five in a room. So it's a very heavily built- up neighborhood, but it's an immigrant

neighborhood still. So you have, on average, a very low income neighborhood, people getting by the best they can, but it's also very vibrant. So there's a lot of street life in the neighborhood. It's one of the first places in Boston where playgrounds were developed, where somebody said, hey, we should set aside this corner of a schoolyard and put a sandbox there and let the kids play alongside street vendors selling all kinds of wares from fresh fish caught that morning to kitchen implements to produce brought in from farms in the countryside around Boston. So if you look at photographs of the North End from the early part of the 20th century, one of the most striking things, besides just how built up it is,

and this sort of narrow warren of these little narrow streets and alleyways, on the main streets, like Salem Street, Hanover Street, just the presence of street life is so vibrant in pictures you would see from the 19-teens or 20s with all different people with the street vendors, the bells from the ships and the docks just a few feet away. So I think it was just a full sensory experience to walk through the streets of the North End in the early 20th century. It was, like I say, not a neighborhood where people had a lot of money. I think it was a very rich neighborhood in culture and just that sense of togetherness. So give us an idea of what the North End and the site of the tank might have looked like in 1919. We're in a ramshackle neighborhood that's seen a lot of transition, mostly immigrants

living there. It's down by the docks. How else could we paint the picture? Well, one thing that becomes important to visualizing what the flood or the aftermath of the flood looked like is to keep in mind that paralleling the waterfront was one of Boston's elevated railway lines. So you think these huge superstructure, these iron girders that are several feet in diameter and stand 30 plus feet up in the air that carry two train tracks, one train track heading in each direction. So that really helps define sort of the margin between the industrial north end and the residential north end. So again, those multifamily housing, those tenements as they were known back then, the large apartment developments.

And then on the other side of Commercial Street and the railroad tracks was more industrial, where you'd have not only things like the large 50 feet tall, 90 feet in diameter, millions of gallons of molasses, but you'd also have things like gasometers, which were large tanks for storing natural gas and making sure that the pressure was at the right level for home delivery. You'd have a number of different businesses associated with the docks that were one after the other after the other down the waterfront. And the North End itself is almost surrounded, especially at the turn of the 20th century, almost surrounded by Boston Harbor. So let's direct our attention to the tank itself. It is enormous, holding millions of gallons of molasses, which is just remarkable to think of in any instance.

But after the tank's rapid construction, were there any immediate signs that the tank might be unstable? Yeah, so the tank was built in 1915. So it only existed on the Boston waterfront for about four years. And as soon as it was built, people in the neighborhood started complaining about it because the first time it was filled, it groaned and moaned and it sounded like it was about to collapse. So people were very worried about the strength, the rigidity, the ability of this tank to contain the pressure of two to three million gallons of molasses. Also, almost immediately, it started to leak. So after a podcast episode I did

years ago about the molasses flood, I had a listener write in and say that her mother could remember being sent out with a cup or a tin can to gather molasses from all the leaky rivets in the molasses tank whenever her mother, so that my listener's grandmother, was baking. And rather than dealing with those problems, the company ended up just painting the tank a dark brown, so it wasn't clear how much it leaked. But people had concerns about this tank right from day one. So it would groan, it would leak. The only remedy for the leak seems to be to paint the tank brown to disguise the drips of molasses, but it was also out exposed to the elements. And I imagine that throughout the year, as weather and temperature changed, that the molasses in the tank might react.

If you think about if any of our listeners bake with molasses, part of the reason why you would keep it in the pantry and not the fridge is that it's impossible to pour out and measure when it's cold. So if you imagine the molasses disaster occurring in mid-January, January 15th, 1919, that would be a time of year when you'd expect the molasses in that unheated, un-anything tank to be a thick, viscous mess. But two things happened to change that. Number one, the day before the disaster, they took a huge delivery of molasses brought in from the Caribbean. And to make it possible to work with the molasses to unload and offload it, the molasses coming from that ship had to be warmed up to a workable temperature. So the cold molasses in the tank was mixing with the warm molasses coming from the ship. And then on the day of the disaster, temperatures in Boston soared overnight. It went

from a very typical January temperature of two degrees, I've heard five degrees, I've heard anything up to about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, which is, even by Boston standards, chilly. And overnight, in less than 24 hours, it warmed up to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. So that also caused the liquid in the tank to start becoming thinner and more liquid, less viscous or sticky like a cold molasses would have been. So even though it was January, it seems like the molasses might have been a much less viscous liquid than we might think about molasses. In fact, everyone characterizes molasses as a thick and slow-moving thing. But that's not what happened

the day of the flood. Yeah, I mean, it's an aphorism in the English language, right? That somebody's moving slower than molasses in January. But when you gather 2.3 million gallons of molasses together and then have your tank fail all at once, it's anything but slow. So we're talking about a wave of molasses moving through a mixed neighborhood of industrial and residential uses with a wave, some people said 15 to 20 feet tall at 35 miles an hour or more. And just for some context, I went and looked up what sprinter Usain Bolt's top speed in miles per hour would have been, and he probably topped out at about 28 miles an hour. So we're talking about an enormous wave of liquid moving through the streets faster than the fastest human can run. What do you imagine the flood itself might have looked or felt or smelled like? How did survivors describe it? When I first encountered the idea or the story of the

molasses flood, it sounds like a joke. But for the people who lived through it, it was terrifying and tragic because it was very disorienting. The people in the neighborhood said that they heard a noise that sounded like a freight train followed by a machine gun. And that's sort of the rivets letting loose and then the tank collapsing itself. And then immediately, some of the buildings immediately around the site of U.S. industrial alcohol were constructed, were stick built. There were wood buildings and they were almost completely destroyed.

Even the firehouse next door, Firehouse 31 was right next door to the molasses tank and it was swept off its foundation, partially collapsed. The firefighters were trapped inside, so they couldn't react to the rest of the victims of the flood. You saw entire houses destroyed. There was a bartender named Martin Clordy who had worked a late shift. So he was

in bed at home when the flood happened, and his whole house was destroyed around him. It was swept off its foundation, knocked into those elevated train tracks, and then basically beat itself to pieces against the steel girders of the train tracks. He survived. He basically crawled back into his bed, pulled his sister up onto his bed with him, and used that as a boat to ride out the rest of the flood. But then his mother drowned in the flood. There was a young boy named Anthony D'Estasio who was on his way home from school. He was walking with three of his sisters. He was picked up, tossed around, tumbled, smashed under the weight of the molasses,

choked unconscious. It got into his throat, up his nose. And because it's so thick, it was almost impossible to clear it out. He was left for dead at first. The first responders who came to him triaged him as dead. And his family found him in a makeshift morgue. They pulled back the sheet to identify his body. And then he opened his eyes and sat up. There was a cop, a Boston police officer, a patrolman named Frank McManus, who was walking his beat on the morning of January 15th, and he witnessed the tank collapsing. He was far enough from danger that he wasn't personally caught up in the wave, but he knew immediately this is a disaster.

He used a police call box to call headquarters and say, send everybody, send every ambulance, every available police officer, every emergency responder should come to the North End now. So I think for everybody who was caught up in the flood or even witnessed it, they knew immediately it was a terrible tragedy. How did Birkenstocks go from a German cobbler's passion project 250 years ago to the Barbie movie today. Who created that bottle of red sriracha with a green top that's permanently living in your fridge? Did you know that the Air Jordans were initially banned by the NBA? We'll explore all that and more in The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy. This is Nick. This is Jack. And we've covered over a

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What was the extent of the damage physically, and how did the city react? For a few blocks around the site of the molasses tank, it was utter devastation. And I don't know how you could have even located a victim in the chaos that followed. You had pieces, huge steel sheets torn apart from the tank itself. The elevated train tracks, those enormous girders and superstructure that I described were twisted, thrown off their foundations. Luckily, there was no train passing at the time, so no passengers were impacted. But the train tracks themselves were heavily damaged. Basically, any wooden structure that was within a few blocks of the tank was demolished or at least swept off its foundation and had to be rebuilt because of that. There was such a huge outpouring of people trying to rescue victims, to get in and make

sense of what had happened, in part because, as I said, the firehouse next door was the first thing that was impacted. And most of the firefighters were trapped inside. They described having to tread water in this molasses for hours until some other workers, some volunteers could get them out of their own building. And unfortunately, one of the firefighters drowned in the molasses during that time, just became exhausted and slipped under the surface. So because the firefighters were themselves victims of this disaster, it fell on lots of unexpected quarters to react. So the first first responders in this case were actually cadets who were on a training ship called the USS

Nantucket. These cadets were some of the first to wade in to the just unbelievable wreckage and chaos in the streets around the molasses tank. Following them, though, you had just neighborhood residents who were worried about friends and loved ones who were coming in, rolling up their sleeves, and trying to sort through all the twisted wreckage to find people who might still be alive and in need of rescue. You had police descend on the north end from all around the city. Firefighters came in from other neighborhoods, Red Cross staff members and volunteers, but also luckily right across the harbor in Charlestown, just moments away by boat is the Charlestown Navy Yard,

which was in the peak of its wartime footing coming out of World War I. So a lot of sailors from the US Navy also responded. One of the most vivid descriptions of the wreckage after the flood comes to the Boston Post, and they described horses being sucked into see just a moving shape under the black liquid, and you had no idea if it was an animal or a human until somebody came and dug them out from where they were. And maybe you got there in time, and maybe you didn't. So in the end, at least 150 people were injured. The death toll rose to 21. So huge human toll, but also as an animal lover, I always think about all those horses that drowned in the terrible conditions in the moments after the flood.

So after the rescue and recovery, very quickly, people started pointing fingers. The victims eventually took the United States Industrial Alcohol Company to court over the loss of life and property. And the company's defense attorney, Charles Choate, tried to take advantage of newspaper headlines throughout the country about a growing anarchist movement. He pointed to anarchists across the United States, but in Boston in particular, too, as violent insurrectionists who could have been responsible for the destruction of the tank. What was this moment in political history that there were political bombings in the streets of Boston? To me, and with the benefit of hindsight, the company blaming anarchists just seems like a

convenient out, a way to avoid blame, avoid responsibility for what we now know was a very poorly constructed tank. But they actually did have some good reasons to think that it could have been a bombing, some sort of violent act against them. At the time, anarchism was a pretty potent political movement. Around the turn of the century, that idea had started gaining a foothold in Europe and then through immigration, through migration in the United States as well. And we started to see in the US right around the turn of the century, some acts of violence attributed to anarchists. So in 1901, President McKinley's shot and he's killed by anarchists. So we're no stranger to anarchy having a foothold here and

to anarchist violence around Boston. But by the 19-teens, that movement starts to be really closely associated with Italian-Americans in Boston. And that's probably mostly due to a man named Luigi Galeani. So he was an Italian-American anarchist, true believer, a major propagandist. He was a writer who lived in Lynn on the North Shore, just north of Boston. So his writings inspired a regional and even national bombing campaign starting in about 1916. There were bombings all over New England, locally, Boston suburbs. Even within the North End itself, you saw a police station in the North End be bombed by anarchists. Luckily, it was after hours, nobody was injured, but it caused massive property damage.

So just five days before the molasses disaster, there were flyers posted around the North End attributed to anarchists and complaining about some debate that had been happening in the U.S. Senate at the time, but it included the line, we will dynamite you. And even not in the Boston area, but in New York and at some of their other facilities during World War I, U.S. industrial alcohol had been the target of an anarchist bombing. There was no shortage of fear around anarchists, and you started to have this close association of that movement with Italian American immigrants, especially here in Boston. I'm glad you mentioned Italian American immigrants because most of the anarchist movement was an immigrant-derived. It was foreign to

American shores and fought, in fact, of course, the American government. So I'm wondering about the extent of anti-immigrant backlash that was fueled by these anarchist attacks. I always picture this as being a similar moment to just after 9-11, in my own memory, when mainstream American society was very ready to treat all Arab Americans, or even Sikhs, or people who had no connection with Arab Americans, and definitely no connection to terrorism, to paint with that broad brush and say, well, you look like the person who perpetrated this crime. And that was hugely true in 19-teens and 20s Boston, where Italian-American immigrants already faced a lot of prejudices because of the language barrier, because of the differences in religion, because of the physical separation into neighborhoods like the North End, where

then it became a very convenient political scapegoat to pin all this radical action on immigrants to say, oh, it's the other. It's the people who aren't like us perpetrating these crimes. There are some elements of truth. There were definitely folks like Sacco and Vanzetti who espoused an anarchist ideology and committed some crimes. But that's such a small, fractional, tiny portion of the immigrant community, but it became very convenient for the rest of society to scapegoat them and to treat them all with suspicion. So it sounds like coming into the case that the defendants have some pretty established scapegoats, a history of violence by anarchists and an entire population that the nation is suspicious of to pin their accusations on.

But Damon Hall, the lawyer who represented 119 plaintiffs, directed the blame explicitly on U.S. industrial alcohol, arguing that they cut corners in construction, ignored warnings about its faulty design, and placed the tank in a crowded neighborhood with little oversight. Do you wonder if the tank had been in a different neighborhood, whether the company would have proceeded with more caution with building the tank, or that the North End was just a convenient place and neglected enough so that concerns of safety could be ignored. I'd say there's plenty of evidence of both. Throughout history, and even today, the most dangerous industries are usually located in the poorest neighborhoods of a city,

where, yes, you can read into that that if the tanks had been located in the very prosperous neighborhoods of the Back Bay or Beacon Hill in Boston, more care would have been taken in construction. But the flip side of that is industrial development like that just wouldn't happen in those neighborhoods. In fact, it was prohibited in the Back Bay. So it would have been better constructed in a more high-income neighborhood, but it would have never been built there. So ultimately, the court agreed with the plaintiffs and the company was held responsible. Remind us of what the consequences were for U.S. industrial alcohol. Yeah, it's this really remarkable trial. It drags on for five years. Like you said, there were initially 119 lawsuits that got consolidated into what we consider one of the

first class action lawsuits in Massachusetts. The judge rules against U.S. industrial alcohol and they are forced to pay out, I believe the figure was $628,000 in damages. It also resulted in a lot of regulatory changes. So up until that point there, interestingly, a lot of Boston building code applied to almost every form of industrial building except a storage tank. So there are no testing, no was required before building the tank, no plans had to be on file stamped and validated by an engineer. They could basically just build this tank with no safeguards. And so that also led Boston to re-evaluate some of its building codes, its construction practices to increase the amount of regulation

around specifically tanks. But it was sort of a top-to-bottom rework of the building codes to make sure that if you were going to build a tank like this, even in a marginal neighborhood like the North End, there would have to be some sort of safety precautions in place. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud.

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When did you first learn the story of the flood? So I'm a transplant to Boston. I moved here in 1997-ish. I've been here just over 25 years, moving here as an adult, I still have that sense of wonder about some of the local historic sites and tourist activities that people who grew up here got bored with in fifth grade. So as I was out exploring Boston and getting to know my adoptive city a little better, you definitely can see some artifacts of the molasses flood in the North End, but they're hard to find. The most obvious is a very small plaque in a park called Langone Park between a couple of ball fields and bocce courts in the corner of the park today. There's probably a foot square plaque marking the site. I really dug more into

the story a little later. Again, as a transplant, I just came to love this city so much. I worked for a few years as a tour guide. And one of the neighborhoods I gave tours in was the North End. And tourists definitely want to hear about the Great Molasses Flood. It's permeated sort of our collective consciousness just enough that you'd have people who wanted to hear not just about the old North Church and Paul Revere's ride. And they didn't just want to go to Copse Hill burying ground and see where the cotton mather and increased mather were buried. They wanted me to take them just down the hill from Copse Hill burying ground to see where the molasses tank was. And it's funny how curious people are about it because it,

like you say, it does, it is one of the oddest disasters, certainly in Boston history. And I, if you told me American history, I would believe it. And people do come in, I think, because of the saying it's slower than molasses in January, because there are these rumors circulating on what I would call questionable travel blogs, saying that you can still, on a hot summer day, you can still smell molasses throughout the streets of Boston. People want to know more about the molasses flood. I will say that maybe for a few years, a few decades, you could smell molasses throughout the streets of Boston, but it's 2023 and you cannot anymore. And in my memory of my 25 plus years in Boston, I cannot remember smelling molasses on a hot day. I do think that the smell lingered for a long time

and it has not lingered for over a century. But because of all the sort of the mythology around the flood, people want to know more about it, but then it often had to involve sort of resetting people's approach or their mindset, because despite how funny it sounds, the molasses flood was a terrible tragedy. So you mentioned a small plaque commemorating the site, but for about 75 years, there was nothing commemorating the site at all. Why do you think it took so long to recognize the disaster? Well, it's a combination of things. It's what one chooses to commemorate, first of all. It took a long time for the North End to rediscover its political power in Boston. Again, having been identified as an immigrant neighborhood for so long and a marginal neighborhood, it took a large

chunk of the 20th century for the North End to have enough political clout to have things that happened there truly recognized by the rest of the city. There's also just the matter of living memory. While the people who survived the Molasses Flood were alive and lived in the North End, who needs a plaque? We all remember what happened. And then it falls to largely, as with any historic event, it falls to the children or the grandchildren of the people who were affected or who witnessed the disaster to make an effort to commemorate it. The 100th anniversary of the flood was just a few years ago. Did the city of Austin do anything to commemorate it? Yeah, there was a small ceremony on the morning of January 15th, 2019.

It was led by Joe Bagley, who was and is the city archaeologist for the city of Boston. A crowd, probably around 100 people, not many more than that, gathered in Langone Park on the site of the disaster. One thing that Joe Bagley could announce during that

ceremony was recent research done by archaeologists that actually identified the remains of the circular foundation of the molasses tank that were still buried underground under the infield of a baseball field there in Langone Park. So for the centennial, he had worked with the researchers to actually mark out the circumference of exactly where the tank would have stood, drew it out in the sand and planted flags to mark the boundary. And then about 60 or 70 people gathered around that circle for a reading of the names of all the victims and a moment of silence and then a wreathing by, I think, the parks commissioner. When we think back on this disaster, it's kind of startling to see how many areas, important areas of American history that the flood touches on. It's at a time at the end of World War I. It's just at the very beginning of Prohibition. It deals crucially with immigration and industrialization.

It is in a moment of burgeoning public and worker safety concerns. It is probably caused by an increasing and differentiating economy in America. There are veins of political ideologies and even violence. There's aspects of civil justice and corporate responsibility and then government responsibility in regulating business. This is an enormous scope of important issues. So I'm wondering, what do you think the legacy of the flood is today? I feel like the legacy of the flood is almost obscured by people have of the molasses flood as being a funny thing that happened 100 years ago kind of obscures how, like you said, it sits at sort of this juncture in history between World War I and Prohibition, between sort of the monarchies of old and the leftist ideologies of the early 20th century. It's all there if you

dig into it. And for me, one of the greatest things is to look at the front pages of Boston newspapers from January 16th, 1919, from the next morning, when above the fold, huge screaming headlines report on the collapse of the molasses tank. Most of them at the time were calling it the explosion of the molasses tank. But then below the fold, what do you read about? You read about the last votes needed for prohibition to be ratified. So the race to be the 36th state to ratify prohibition. The other major headline on almost all the Boston papers that next morning reports on post-war chaos in Germany and will there be a new outbreak of war? How will the European states be shaped in this sort of lawless time immediately after the armistice?

So you can see from the news coverage at the time, it immediately seems historic. So we just have to, from a modern perspective, we have to dig past the legend of the Molasses Flood to find the real history. Jake Sconiers, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American History Tellers. I appreciate the chance to talk about the Boston Molasses Flood. Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with Jake Scaniers, the founder and host of the podcast Hub History, available at hubhistory.com or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, this is the final episode in our series for American history tellers,

Boston Molasses Disaster. In our next season, in the early 1960s, after decades of meager wages and deplorable working conditions, California farm workers came together under a charismatic leader named Cesar Chavez. Their union, the United Farm Workers, would call a strike against the powerful growers of California's Central Valley, initiating a nationwide boycott of California-grown grapes, but soon shifting American politics and the limits of Chavez's leadership

would threaten the future of the movement. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Audio editing and sound design by Molly Bach. Additional writing by Dorian Marina. This episode was produced by Morgan Jaffe and Polly Stryker.

Our interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni, produced by Alita Rozanski. Production coordinator, Desi Blaylock. Managing producer, Matt Gant. Senior managing producer, Tanja Thigpen. Senior producer is Andy Herman, and executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marsha Louis for Wondery. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal.

There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have urged it. It just happens to all of us. I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn Trials I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction.

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