The General Slocum disaster of 1904 killed more than 1,000 people, most of them German immigrants and German-Americans. It was one of the deadliest fires in American history and by far the United States’ most deadly peacetime maritime disaster. It was also New York’s deadliest day before the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001. Yet even today most Americans (indeed, even most New Yorkers) know nothing about it. 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 Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany. Located on the Lower East Side in what is today called the East Village, Kleindeutschland 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 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. On June 15, 1904, more than 1,300 people boarded the General Slocum for a day at Locust Grove on Long Island Sound.

Smoke from the storage room

Shortly after 9:30 a.m., the crew of the General Slocum cast off and the ship pulled away from the pier. It chugged northward up the East River, gradually increasing speed. Hundreds of children jammed the upper deck to take it all in. Like most mornings, the river was full of boats of every description – barges, lighters, tenders, and tugs. The adults talked and listened to a band play German favorites. Then disaster struck. As the ship passed East 90th Street, smoke started billowing from a forward storage room. A spark, most likely from a carelessly tossed match, had ignited a barrel of straw. Several crewmen tried to put the fire out, but they had never conducted a fire drill or undergone any emergency training. To make matters worse, the ship’s rotten fire hoses burst when the water was turned on. By the time they notified Captain William Van Schaick of the emergency – fully ten minutes after discovering the fire – the blaze raged out of control.

The captain looked to the piers along the East River, but feared he might touch off an explosion among the many oil tanks there. Instead, even as onlookers on the Manhattan shore shouted for him to dock the ship, he opted to proceed at top speed to North Brother Island a mile ahead. Several small boats followed the floating inferno as it roared upriver.

The increased speed fanned the flames. Panicked passengers ran about the deck, unsure where to take refuge. Mothers screamed for their children, husbands for their wives. The flames, accelerated by a fresh coat of highly flammable paint, rapidly enveloped the ship and passengers began to jump overboard. Some clung to the rails as long as they could before jumping into the churning water. A few were rescued by nearby boats, but most did not know how to swim and simply drowned.

The inexperienced crew provided no help. Nor did the 3,000 lifejackets on board. Rotten and filled with disintegrated cork, they had long since lost their buoyancy. Those who put them on sank as soon as they hit the water. Wired in place, none of the lifeboats could be dislodged. Even if they had, they would never have made it safely into the water with the ship chugging along at top speed.

The ship's grisly wake

By the time the ship finally beached at North Brother Island, it was almost completely engulfed in fire. Survivors poured over the railings into the water. Some huddled in the few places not yet reached by the flames, too terrified to jump. Nurses and patients at the island’s contagious disease hospital rushed to offer assistance. Several of them grabbed ladders being used to renovate the facility and used them to bring the survivors off the ship. Others caught children tossed by distraught parents. Within minutes, all who could be saved, including the captain and several crew, were moved away from the burning hulk.

The General Slocum left a grisly wake. The boats that followed seeking to offer assistance plucked a few survivors from the water. But mostly they found only the lifeless bodies of the ship’s ill-fated passengers. The fact that most were young children only added to the horror.

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 23rd 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.

Part II: The Invisible Disaster 

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

How could a tragedy of such magnitude occur within a few hundred yards of the shores of the nation’s most modern city? In the weeks and months that followed the fire, an outraged public searched for answers and culprits. City officials vowed to conduct a thorough investigation and within weeks, Captain Van Schaick, executives of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Co., and the Inspector who certified the General Slocum as safe only a month before the fire were indicted.

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 that willfully operated the unsafe vessel, and the rest went free, a result that compounded the suffering of those affected by the fire.

Changing New York's ethnic map

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. This 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 also prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to name a commission to investigate the Slocum tragedy and recommend measures that would prevent an event like it from occurring again. The commission held hearings in New York and Washington, D. C. and took testimony from hundreds of witnesses and experts. The result was a major upgrading of steamboat safety regulations and a sweeping reform of the United States Steamboat Inspection Service (USSIS), leading to dramatic improvements in steamboat safety.

Remarkably, the Slocum tragedy rapidly faded from public memory, to the point that it was replaced as New York City’s GREAT fire just 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. But the Triangle fire’s death toll was 85% lower than the Slocum just seven years earlier. How then did it become 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.

Forgetting as a way of life

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 factory fire was fast achieving iconic status as the city’s, even America’s, most famous and memorable fire.

Finally, there is the relentless pursuit of all that is new for which New York City is so famous. Nowhere in America (and arguably the world), either in 1904 or 2006, 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 time of the fire, “that the past is lost.” No story, no matter how big, remains in the public consciousness for very long. For New Yorkers forgetting is a way of life.

Still, the memory of the General Slocum disaster 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 the film “Manhattan Melodrama” opened with a stunning re-enactment of the fire. Newspapers carried occasional stories about the fire on significant anniversaries, such as the 50th in 1954 and the 75th in 1979. The release of the blockbuster film “Titanic” in 1997 and the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 brought renewed interest in the Slocum story, as did the 100th anniversary of the disaster in 2004.

Ultimately, the actual memories of traumatic events like the Slocum fire 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. The last survivor of the Slocum, Adella Liebenow Wotherspoon of Watchung, NJ, died at age 100 in early 2004, taking with her the last real memories of the disaster. The Slocum story now exists not as a memory, but rather as a cautionary tale of greed and carelessness and a story of unspeakable loss and extraordinary courage.