General Slocum
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The General Slocum was a paddle steamer of the New York "Knickerbocker Steamship Company", which caught fire on June 15, 1904 on New York's East River and sank. 1021 people were killed in the disaster . To date, it is the largest civil shipping disaster in the United States. It is considered to be the main reason for the dissolution of New York's German quarter Kleindeutschland in the following years.
The ship was named after the New York Northern States - General of the Civil War and Congressman Henry Warner Slocum .
The ship
The paddle steamer was built between 1890-1891 on the shipyard Devine Burtis in Brooklyn Harbor Red Hook built entirely of wood. It was 76 meters long, displaced 1281 tons and with its three decks was approved for 3000 passengers . His steam engine from the W. & A. Fletcher Company of Hoboken allowed a cruising speed of 15 knots.
With its luxurious furnishings ( velvet chairs , carpeting , paintings) and the technical parameters, the General Slocum was considered the ultimate in New York excursion traffic in its early years , before it was declassified by younger and more modern ships and neglected by its owners.
During its entire operation, the Slocum was under the command of Captain William van Schaick .
The misfortune
The injured passengers were German-Americans , day trippers of the Lutheran St. Mark's Church in the district of Kleindeutschland on the Lower East Side (East 6th Street). The accident sealed the downfall of this German congregation, which wanted to celebrate the end of the Sunday school year on that day . Around 80,000 emigrants of German origin lived in New York's small Germany at that time. Every year a ship was chartered to go to a nearby recreational park, Locust Grove on Long Island Sound . On June 15, 1904, at least 1,388 people were on board the General Slocum ; the ship had been booked for $ 350. June 15th was a Wednesday, a working day on which most husbands went to work, which explains the high number of victims of women and children.
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Around 9:30 a.m., sailors discovered fire in a u. a. The hold filled with oil, paint and other operating materials, presumably ignited by a match that was thrown away inadvertently. The fire spread quickly. The attempts to extinguish the fire failed - among other things because the fire hoses had rotted and burst under the water pressure. The crew was also not trained to use it.
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The captain was only informed of the impending disaster ten minutes after the fire had broken out. The ship was in Hell Gate at this time . This is still the most difficult part of the East River to navigate, due to the dangerous eddies that have caused many shipwrecks over the centuries. It was therefore not possible for the captain to head for the nearby bank, and so he gave the order to steer full steam ahead to North Brother Island, about a mile away . The closest landing stages on the East River were not considered for a landing due to the oil tank farm there. The fire was further fanned by the increased speed and the prevailing head wind.
Panic had broken out among the passengers. It turned out that the cork of the life jackets had dissolved , making them unusable. The lifeboats could not be lowered into the water because they were stuck to the hull with paint. Because of the speed of the ship, it would not have been possible to water them either. The color provided additional nourishment for the fire.
When the ship finally North Brother Iceland to the quarantine hospital of New York Harbor reached, it burned nearly full-length. Many passengers jumped into the water here, many of whom drowned because most of them were non-swimmers . Since there was busy shipping traffic on the East River at that time, many boats took part in the rescue operation. Officially, the number of victims was given as 1,021. However, experts suspect that there were more, because no tickets were required to take children under one year old. There is therefore no reliable information about the actual number of passengers and victims.
The consequences
In the weeks that followed, extensive investigations into the cause of the accident were carried out. The ship's captain, Captain Van Schaick, was charged and sentenced to ten years in prison. After three years, he was released at the instigation of President William H. Taft .
Those responsible for the shipping company, on the other hand, were only sentenced to a small fine, although it could be proven that documents had been forged in order to cover up the neglect of the safety regulations. The inspection inspector, who certified the ship a month before the disaster, was also released without penalty.
The General Slocum disaster left a permanent wound. The enclave of Small Germany subsequently dissolved further. Almost every family has suffered a death. Some of the remaining residents settled several blocks further north, where there was another German parish that still exists today ( Zion St. Mark's Lutheran Church , 339 East 84th St.); others left New York entirely. At the 1910 census, only a handful of the original residents were left in the victims' former residential area. Many gravestones dated June 15, 1904 can still be found in Queens Cemetery today. The central memorial stone for the Slocum disaster is located in Tompkins Square Park , New York .
As a result, the safety regulations for steamships were significantly tightened. President Theodore Roosevelt set up a commission to investigate the disaster and recommend measures to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. All steamers were then subjected to a detailed inspection, and the United States Steamboat Inspection Service (USSIS) was completely reorganized.
The remains of General Slocum were recovered, rebuilt, and christened Maryland . This ship temporarily served as a coal tender until it sank on December 4, 1911 after a severe storm.
Later development
Shortly afterwards, the memory of the accident was masked by another fire disaster: the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory , a shirt factory that left 146 dead. With the First World War, hostility towards Germans became rampant in the USA and there were other reasons to push the misfortune of immigrants of German origin from public memory. Many Americans refrained from emphasizing their German roots.
In 1915, the famous American director Raoul Walsh made the film Regeneration , in which the fire on the General Slocum also appears. In 1922 James Joyce had his novel Ulysses act on a single day, June 16, 1904, the day the news of the shipwreck reached Ireland . Joyce lets his hero Leopold Bloom read the headlines and think: All those women and children excursion beanfeast burned and drowned in New York. Holocaust . ( All of these women and children burned and drowned on one excursion in New York. Holocaust. ). In 1934, the US film Manhattan Melodrama (with Clark Gable in the leading role) by director WS Van Dyke followed , in which the accident with an impressive staging of the fire serves as the starting point for a play about two adults who started the fire of General Slocum as children survived, but went on very different paths afterwards.
The last of the 400 or so survivors of the General Slocum fire , Adella Liebenow Wotherspoon of Watchung, New Jersey, died in 2004 at the age of 100. At the time of the accident that also killed her two siblings, she was still an infant.
Documentaries
In 1998, the German filmmaker Christian Baudissin shot a documentary with the title The Slocum is burning , partly at the original locations. about the misfortune of General Slocum . Some of the survivors of the disaster also have their say in the film. An American documentary was made in 2004 on the 100th anniversary of the catastrophe under the title Fearful Visitation. New York's Great Steamboat Fire of 1904. ( Fearful visit. New York's Great Steamboat Fire of 1904. ). The producers were Hank Linhart and Phil Dray. The docudrama Ship Ablaze was also created for the 100th anniversary . The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum. ( Ship in Flames. The Tragedy of the Steamer General Slocum. ) Based on the book of the same name by Ed O'Donnell.
See also
literature
- Edward T. O'Donnell: Ship ablaze. The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum . Broadway Books, New York 2003, ISBN 0-7679-0905-4 .
- Edward T. O'Donnell: The Outing. The end of Little Germany, New York . Marebuchverlag, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-936384-93-2 .
- Mare No. 55 "James Cook", April / May 2006.
- Edward T. O'Donnell: Ship tragedy in New York - Little Germany's sinking. In: Der Spiegel Online, April 7, 2006 ( spiegel.de ).
- Reward for Bravery at the Burning of the General Slocum. In: The New York Times . April 25, 1905 ( nytimes.com ).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ James Joyce : Ulysses on wikisource.org.
- ↑ General Slocum in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ^ Fearful Visitation: The Great New York Steamboat Fire of 1904. Announcement of the New York Historical Society (English, PDF).
- ^ Edward T. O'Donnell: Ship ablaze. The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum. Broadway Books, New York 2003, ISBN 0-7679-0905-4 .