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Edward T. O'Donnell is an associate professor of American history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
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This was a fascinating and pivotal time in American history with more than its share of larger-than-life personalities. O'Donnell does a decent job of surveying the period, but the course suffers a bit from repetitions and re-use of the same images over and over. As a lecturer, he is in the middle of the Great Courses pack, occasionally stumbling over his teleprompter-led narrative. There are also few cases where his insight into his material seems a bit shallow. Nevertheless, this was enjoyable and educational.… (més)
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datrappert | May 17, 2022 |
From the disaster reading list. Up until 9/11, the General Slocum fire of June 15, 1904 was the single greatest loss of life in New York City history. It has an eerie historical resonance; it’s the subject of a couple of stream-of-consciousness paragraphs in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and was a lead-in for the 1934 film Manhattan Melodrama, notable for being the picture John Dillinger saw just before encountering the G-men outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater. I confess I tend to get the General Slocum mixed up with the Eastland; they were vaguely similar vessels and both were carrying excursion parties – a German Lutheran church picnic in the case of the General Slocum and a Western Electric Company outing for the Eastland.


It’s familiar stuff, alas. The General Slocum’s owners found safety measures too expensive, Captain William Van Schaick was in perfect agreement with that point of view, and the United States Steamboat Inspection Service was a bunch of political appointees who were adverse to making waves. As a result the General Slocum had never had a fire drill, the fire hoses were rotten, the cork in the life jackets had long since disintegrated to dust, and the lifeboats were wired to the deck. When a fire broke out in the “lamp room”, crew members made an cursory effort to fight it, found that the fire hose burst in five places when the engine room turned the pump on, and fled (the only crew member lost was the purser, who made the mistake of donning one of the life jackets and promptly sunk to the bottom of Long Island Sound when he went over the side carrying the ship’s money). Captain Van Schaick put on full speed in an attempt to beach the ship on North Brother Island, despite the fact there were much closer locations; Van Schaick latter explained that he was in the tricky Hell Gate passage and was concerned that if he tried to beach there the General Slocum would run aground on the rocks too far from the shore. As it turned out, that’s just what happened anyway; the high speed dash for North Brother Island just fanned the flames and the General Slocum ended up aground more than 50 feet from shore, with many passengers drowning as they were forced off the boat by the flames. Most of the victims were women and children; the men were at work that day. Few knew how to swim, the rotten life jackets quickly waterlogged and dragged the wearers under (in several cases, the only members of a family group lost were those wearing life jackets), and even if a few happened to know how to swim everyone was wearing their best clothes for the picnic and couldn’t manage much in an Edwardian hobble skirt and corset.


The final death toll was around 1021; nobody was quite sure how many were on board. It pretty much wiped out the Lutheran parish involved. The subsequent investigation was something of a whitewash. The owner, after lying at length about conditions (he had his secretary alter records of life jacket purchases but was caught), eventually got off on the plea that since the ship had been inspected and passed by a US government agency he was not liable. The inspector that passed the General Slocum went through three mistrials before his case was eventually dropped (I really don’t understand how this happened; his claim that he saw the ship’s lifeboats “swinging on the davits” turned out to be a little weak when divers brought them up still wired to the deck chocks. I assume the fix was in. He disappeared after the last mistrial and was never found again) His three superiors at the USSIS were forced to retire. Captain Van Schaick was the fall guy; he was sentenced to 10 years in Sing Sing but was paroled after serving two. Survivors gathered for memorial services annual until they were too old; the last died in 2004, age 100.


It’s interesting to compare Ship Ablaze with San Francisco is Burning, also recently reviewed. Ship Ablaze author Edward O’Donnell is a historian, but put considerable effort into understanding fire dynamics, consulting the New York City fire department, an independent fire consultant, and a marine surveyor. As a result his accounts of fire and ship behavior are well explained. The author of San Francisco is Burning, firefighter Dennis Smith, didn’t spend nearly enough time studying earthquakes, resulting in a laughable account of ground shaking behavior. O’Donnell’s book is an exciting page turner with good historical background; Smith’s is derivative and disappointing.


As far a disaster behavior goes, the General Slocum provides some insight. The crew mostly panicked and deserted. Although Van Schaick stayed at his post (he was burned pretty badly) his error in judgment in putting on full speed and heading for North Brother Island contributed to the disaster (ironically, the engine room crew stayed at their posts – if they had abandoned ship like the rest of the crew the General Slocum would have been left dead in the water – allowing a New York City fire boat and numerous other vessels coming to her aid to catch up. As it was they chased her all the way to the beach). Some passengers behaved coolly; others panicked – alas, it didn’t make much difference.


There’s a nice elevation view of the General Slocum, and a map of the East River showing her final trip (unfortunately, it doesn’t show exactly where she was when the fire started; maybe O’Donnell wasn’t quite sure). The references are not organized in a standard bibliography but discussed in a text appendix, which is a little harder to use but still adequate. Interesting and recommended.
… (més)
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1 vota
Marcat
setnahkt | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Dec 19, 2017 |
As with so many of the great minds, Henry George was struck by metaphorical lightning one day. It happened while riding on the outskirts of San Francisco. Stopping to inquire on the status of land being parceled, a worker told him it was selling for a thousand dollars an acre. Instantly, George understood that the price of land was what creates poverty. It took another decade for him to formalize his theory. He went so far as to posit land as a third factor in the equation of capital and labor. Landowners’ rents reduced the income of both capitalists and labor, yet it was the only factor that was not expandable. Capital and labor were fungible, but you couldn’t manufacture more land. He wrote a massive book, Progress and Poverty, which eventually became a worldwide bestseller (first he had to self publish it), the first economics book to do so. A good sign was that the Vatican banned his works.

Yet he wasn’t a socialist. He was thoroughly pro-capitalism; it was class conflict he abhorred, and his “single tax” was to be the great leveler, achieving for real what America thought of itself in theory. The solution was to tax all land. This would prevent speculation and prevent rents, as they would be taxed out of existence. It was not seizure; it was taxation. He said poverty was an artificial condition of man’s invention, and the single tax would correct the imbalance. He became such a celebrity in New York they nominated him to run for mayor in an era when inequality was getting critically ugly.

O’Donnell sets the stage expertly, recounting the various key events that snowballed into a unique and unexpected political opportunity for George and the labor movement. George, reporting in Ireland, hardly makes an appearance for about a hundred pages of this “social” biography, as circumstances mount back home for his celebrated return and rise to political fame.

George’s singleminded focus on the single tax was also his weakness. After nearly winning the mayoral election in New York, he did not turn pro. He did not leverage the gigantic wave of interest in labor nationwide, did not take sole charge and build a national party, and did not become the federal level politician whose credibility and authority would be respected coast to coast. Not only did he not build his goodwill in labor circles, he downplayed and deemphasized it, melting his constituency into warring factions, while he pursued the middle classes. No surprise, it all evaporated. As much as he vaulted labor to the forefront, he also set it back 20 years.

The one odd thing about this biography is George’s next big book, on economics and free trade. Widely quoted even today, O’Donnell only mentions it because George lost the manuscript in a move to Brooklyn. He had to rewrite the whole thing. It was particularly important to both him and us because George left school at 14. He was a self taught economist, whose insights remain respected. But we never hear about it again.

This oversight aside, Henry George was a pivotal figure in a pivotal time. His influence is acknowledged worldwide. It is very much worth knowing and understanding the role he played in the maturing of the USA.

David Wineberg
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DavidWineberg | Dec 19, 2014 |
It's not O'Nan's The Circus Fire (the gold standard by which all other books of sudden death are measured in my mind) but it does its job. O'Donnell is a good historian, clearly fond of the city, and able to deftly contextualize many elements - particularly the German immigrant community from which most of the victims hailed and the media reaction to the tragedy's aftermath - in order to both convey the tremendous impact of the event and explain why it is so nearly forgotten today. And he has a deft touch with the human elements, getting as sentimental and as gruesome as is appropriate and no more so; his descriptions of desperate mothers and children strapping on life vests, unaware that the cork inside had long ago rotted and would pull them under, is particularly chilling....

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Marcat
teratologist | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Jun 20, 2008 |

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