Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 Book

This historical event is yet another example of the truthiness of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." In this case, a cowardly middle manager with no relevant experience cuts corners to please his clueless bosses, constructing a huge, dangerous, leaky tower for molasses in a crowded slum. He disregards direct pleas from people who work at the structure and feel that it is dangerous, insisting that he, the middle manager, knows better. However, the middle manager is sufficiently concerned to order the tower painted the color of molasses, so the extent of the leaking is not so obvious. When disaster inevitably strikes and innocent (also: poor, foreign, powerless) people are killed, the manager's organization goes into full spin-control mode, wrapping itself in the flag and blaming shadowy foreign terrorists. (Insert your own rueful comment about more recent world events here.) Meanwhile, the organization acquires the services of the best lawyers and experts that money can buy, just in case.

Descriptions of this incident often contain the word "curious", because we're not used to thinking of molasses as being as dangerous as, say, water or fire. Water looks harmless in the glass, and fire seems fairly friendly at the end of a match, but we've all seen evidence of the power of these elements - if you're fortunate, only on You Tube or in the movies. The few souls who have witnessed a wall of molasses several stories tall devouring a whole neighborhood have passed away, so the rest of us are free today to envision molasses as a vaguely ridiculous gelatinous substance oozing harmlessly from a tiny jar. So cute! Not at all like a nightmare of brown sludge pounding down the city streets with the velocity of a speeding car, drowning people and pulverizing structures unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One of the unlikely heroes in this book turns out to be Hugh Ogden, the Boston judge for the subsequent court case against the owners of the tank. On first examination, he seems like the type who might be sympathetic to the foreign terrorist argument, meaning, he was a strict law-and-order patriot and veteran. Lawyers for the owners attempted to appeal to Ogden's presumed political bias. I speculate that Judge Ogden realized that getting at the truth of the case, even if it contradicted his political sympathies, was the best service he could do for his country. This he did, finding for the families of those killed and injured. I hope that his spirit continues to live on in judges today.

Recommended in The Given Day by Dennis Lehane.