Postscript

AN IN-DEPTH INVESTIGATION, prompted by public outrage and a campaign by the press to punish those responsible for the General Slocum disaster, resulted in a number of indictments, most notably of Captain Van Schaick and Frank Barnaby, president of the Knickerbocker Steamship Company, among others. The subsequent trials revealed a litany of neglect, falsified records, bogus safety inspections, unsafe fire hoses, untrained crewmen, rotting life vests, and inoperable lifeboats. Ultimately, the only person to serve any jail time was Captain Van Schaick. He was sentenced to serve ten years at Sing Sing prison, but was paroled after three. Upon his conviction, Van Schaick said, “The United States Government made me a scapegoat.” He died in 1927 at the age of ninety.

The General Slocum fire claimed more lives than any other civilian maritime disaster in U. S. history. Eclipsed in the public mind by the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and most recently by the attack on the World Trade Center, the General Slocum fire stands alone in the loss of multiple family members, and its devastation of an entire community. The disaster claimed 1,021 lives. Hundreds of the victims were children.

Adella Liebenow Wotherspoon, the last living survivor of the General Slocum disaster, died on January 26, 2004, at the age of one hundred. Her two sisters perished on the General Slocum, as did two cousins and two aunts. Her mother survived, but was badly burned. She was both the youngest and last living survivor.

A memorial monument was erected over the graves of the sixty-one unknown victims of the General Slocum fire in the Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens. It stands to this day.