THE MAN IN CHARGE OF ALL OF THIS RECOVERY ACTIVITY IN Johnstown was one Daniel Hastings, adjutant general of Pennsylvania. With no real military experience, Hastings was nevertheless a big, crisp, authoritative, and confident figure, with a bearing befitting his title. Admitted to the bar in 1875, he had a thriving law practice, and he was invested in coal mines and banks. His only real command of troops had come twelve years earlier in helping put down the railroad strike.
Hastings had arrived in Johnstown—he lived in Bellefonte, seventy miles away—on Sunday morning. That day, it wasn’t clear how official his presence really was, but despite the election of Dictator Moxham, Hastings was the state’s ranking military officer, and that morning he began a process—appreciated by some, criticized by others—for taking semi-official charge of everything. His first impression of the situation at the disaster site was that armed forces were badly needed here. He collaborated, at first, with Dictator Moxham, and proposed asking the governor to send troops.
Moxham objected. He thought it was important for the people of Johnstown to manage crime problems themselves, through their own civil efforts, without an influx of outside police and military. That would strengthen the beaten people’s self-reliance and maintain their accustomed democratically accountable local policing.
Rev. Beale disagreed. His very first action had been to send a message to the governor to ask for troops, and as his mad rush of work went on in those first few days, the reverend’s main concern was law and order. As he went about the awful work of claiming standing buildings to use as morgues, laying out bodies, and comforting grieving families, Beale identified three types of crime.
One was simple theft of stuff lying in the wreckage, everything from clothing to silverware, from money to fabric, from coal oil to whiskey. Another was trophy-seeking: creepily enough, people were already coming to town from far away to get their hands on disaster souvenirs, small things like spoons, jewelry, hymnals, anything you could easily carry off that had actually been through the flood.
The worst, in a way, Beale thought, were the con men. People were already showing up in Johnstown offering distraught and homeless people, especially good-looking young women, all kinds of phony hopes: new homes, for one thing, if the women would only come away with them.
All of this had to be stopped, and to Beale, the need for a military level of policing was self-evident. The chief of police had been overwhelmed by grief at the loss of his family in the flood. Captain Hart, as a head of the police committee, was trying, and within eighteen hours after the flood, three hundred policemen were guarding two banks whose vaults reportedly still held more than $400,000. When the first trains began getting in from Pittsburgh, some police from that city were among the arrivals. But it wasn’t anywhere near enough, Beale was sure.
Along with real crimes, rumors had started flying of invented ones, badly frightening the city’s shaky people. Reports of atrocities were atrociously exaggerated: no fingers were actually being cut off by “human ghouls.” Still, at a meeting on Sunday night, with Moxham arguing for his local police concept, men like the Reverend Beale supported General Hastings in his effort to get state troops onto the scene. Rumor had it that the looting was being carried out by “the Hungarians,” a term that stood for any immigrant of Slavic descent. Beale knew that wasn’t true—the thieving he’d witnessed involved all ethnicities—but it was also being said that in response to this demonizing of the recent immigrant population, vigilante posses were forming to kill recent immigrants who struck them as suspicious. Charlie Dick, the man who had insisted on getting his family up on the hillside, fallen asleep, and then witnessed the horror of the fire at the bridge, had been elected, like Moxham, “generalissimo” of a borough now cut off from Johnstown proper by the bridge failure. People were saying that Dick had taken to carrying a rifle and shooting thieves from horseback. That didn’t sound like Charlie Dick, and Beale later ascertained that the story was nothing but a fabrication.
And yet it was by no means impossible to imagine, given the fact of real, ongoing theft, and drunkenness, and the general depression and displacement of all of the people, that English-speakers would turn violently against the immigrants: “fearsome Huns” and “worthless Poles” were other terms being used for looters. The community was coming together, as communities do, in the face of disaster. But the community was also coming apart, over anger and bias and fear that had long preceded the disaster and now, like the mud below the former city, lay exposed.
Then there was the sudden, ongoing influx of thousands of people from outside of town—many to help; plenty to steal, gawk, or run cons. The Reverend Beale wasn’t alone in thinking that General Hastings had the only realistic solution to all of this rising conflict: bring in police and troops and regain and maintain order.
So the general overrode the elected dictator Arthur Moxham and sent a message to the governor, asking for troops. A few days later, Moxham stepped down and was replaced by a member of the Pittsburgh committee, James Scott, who added some new committees: one of them, the Department of Public Safety, was now to be run by General Hastings. Meanwhile, policing efforts started swelling in a chaotic manner. Pittsburgh sent trains with real police, but some members of the Pittsburgh Relief Committee visiting Johnstown put on stars they’d cut out of tin and appointed themselves police, too, walking around with baseball bats. It was hard to tell the real police from the self-appointed kind, and it wasn’t clear who really had arrest powers. Shattered locals, exhausted by ceaseless work and overwhelmed by loss, were on the one hand grateful for the support of Pittsburgh, on the other hand at once frightened and irritated by the presence of more than one thousand varying, temporary, semi-official police, arresting journalists and assigning them to work crews and launching, on their own hook, a program of shooting all stray dogs and cats.
The surviving Johnstowners felt even further put upon by what seemed to be a prevailing idea among outsiders trying to help: that in the face of disaster, they’d suddenly become a lawless people, incapable of running their own affairs. The fact was that most of the crime—certainly the overwhelming number of the arrests—involved people not from Johnstown but from outside. Ordinary citizens struggling with unimaginable losses and challenges didn’t necessarily enjoy all this friendly control imposed on them from Pittsburgh.
Soon the Pittsburgh relief man James Scott was out, too: the state had officially taken over now, and on June 12 General Hastings was put in official charge of the whole thing. In his hands lay all logistics of cleanup, relief, and law enforcement. By then, in the stark mud field that had once been the city’s rectangular Central Park, Hastings had established a military camp for about six hundred troops of the state’s Fourteenth Infantry Regiment, as sent by the governor at his request. By June 20, meanwhile, civic policing was back under the control of the city’s police chief. That was a relief to many Johnstowners: the more familiar force—people knew their policemen—had been reestablished as well and was making its difficult rounds through the wreckage.
One of the biggest jobs requiring military degrees of planning, administration, and deployment was disinfecting the entire disaster area. Any house not swept away was filled, to at least the second floor, with deadly muck: whatever the water touched, it polluted, so the slime on the wreckage and the mud below made the whole scene a breeding ground for disease, thus also for dread. Remedying filth on such a vast scale couldn’t, in the end, be a bottom-up or semi-voluntary project.
Huge supplies of many different kinds of disinfectant came in by train, not only from Pittsburgh but also from Baltimore and, especially important, at the order of President Harrison and Surgeon General John B. Hamilton, from the nation’s capital. Dr. Hamilton also visited Johnstown and advised on medical care, disease prevention, and the uses of the different kinds of disinfectant.
A sanitary corps was established. It divided the city in twelve districts, each of which was assigned an inspector required to make a daily round and ensure that the disinfecting crews, under their foremen, were actually disinfecting. The district inspector was also to distribute disinfectants and instruct people in standing or only partially demolished houses how to apply them, in cellars, yards, and outhouses. Each district had its own office and a warehouse for storing the products, where people were urged, by placards posted all over the ruined city, to come and get the ones for domestic use.
Throughout all of the districts, the amounts and kinds of disinfectant sent, received, stored, and used were mind-boggling: thousands of barrels and bottles of quicklime, chloride of lime, bromine, copperas, carbolic acid, muriatic acid, nitric acid, rosin, barrels of pine tar, pitch, sodium hypochlorite, corrosive sublimate, phenyle. Also proprietary products, with brand names familiar in the day: Sanitas, Bromo-Chloralum, Phenique, Utopia, Purity. The proprietary stuff handed out for home use came in small packages with directions. The big stuff, especially bromine, was used on big, mucky, foul surfaces and for wide street sprinkling, sometimes in high, white heaps.
The workers’ camps also had to stay clean. Thousands of people were using latrines daily, and those latrines had to be disinfected daily, along with the giant kitchens that fed both victims and workers. As the bodies were pulled and embalmed, and the wreckage moved to expose new layers of filth, and people scattered the products in the cellars and yards, the whole scene came to lie under blankets and piles of acrid chemicals.
Unlike the Reverend Beale, Tom L. Johnson was less concerned about the crime situation than about long-range planning for a different kind of civic future, one in which things like this disaster could not occur. As the former monopolist went about his grisly work of pulling out bodies, his natural ebullience somehow didn’t fail him, and he was taking a different view from Beale, not only of policing but also of what a city really needed at a time like this.
For some time, Tom had been trying to get hold of Johnstown’s streetcar franchise, just as he’d done in so many other cities. The current owners of the streetcar line hadn’t wanted to sell. Now they did: with the city destroyed, the streetcar business was a liability, not an asset. Most of its cars and tracks were washed away. Tracks not destroyed were under debris. Early in the recovery, Tom Johnson not only bought the streetcar service but did so at a rock-bottom price. The sellers, he figured, thought he was an idiot.
But Johnson knew two things. One was that since the debris was being so laboriously cleaned up, by himself and others, sooner or later Johnstown would be back. In fact, he was finding it marvelous: utter destruction was already being ameliorated, and the short time that had passed since the flood suggested to him that complete reconstruction was not only possible but would take less time than anyone could have imagined. The ability of ordinary people to get things done was making a big impression on Tom.
So the value of the streetcar would have to rise. With an investment in new track, it would run again.
The other thing Tom knew: when it did run again, he would run it for free, at least for the first few months. He and Moxham had already made their private steam railway from the town of Moxham to Johnstown free to passengers, and Johnson wasn’t noticing anybody around Johnstown talking about the sacred rights of property in the aftermath of the disaster. People were giving away food and clothing. Why shouldn’t he give away transportation?
At first, as he developed this plan, Tom thought only that trying to make money on essential services when disaster conditions prevail is obviously a criminal act. He tweaked his partners by telling them the great thing about his free-of-charge approach: all fare collection problems endemic to the streetcar business would now simply evaporate. They replied that, on balance, they’d prefer to cope with fare beaters than lose income from passengers.
Then Johnson began to think that streetcars everywhere should be free of charge, always. The fact that a private enterprise could make money on the service had long been a source, as he knew quite well from successful experience, of capitalists corrupting government to gain the franchise. Nobody was trying, by contrast, to get hold of any fire department franchises: there were none, because there was no money in firefighting.
Maybe transportation was like firefighting. Maybe all essential services should be run that way. Funding to run the service could come from public money raised by taxes—possibly new taxes on land—and not by charging people who had no choice but to ride. For Tom L. Johnson, the horrible cleanup after the Johnstown Flood, which had been caused, he had no doubt, by the heedlessness engendered by special privilege, was turning into a laboratory for new civic thinking.
General Hastings had begun trying to run everything with military precision even before he’d been officially appointed by the governor to do so. And before his official appointment, he’d faced a weird disruption that he found hard to process.
On Tuesday afternoon, June 4, with troops sent by the governor already arriving and being deployed throughout the wrecked town, Hastings found himself confronted by a small, slight woman, barely five feet tall, in a black dress. This poor, lone woman—that’s how she struck him—announced to him that the Red Cross had arrived in the field.
The term “Red Cross” meant nothing to General Hastings. The woman’s name—Clara Barton—might have rung a bell: she’d gained some renown over the years, but the Red Cross wasn’t anything like a well-known or well-established organization. Barton had formed it herself, only eight years earlier. The Red Cross had performed some important relief work in Texas, but it wasn’t the only organization of its kind, or the leading one, and while it had been chartered by the United States government, it had zero authority or reputation. General Hastings couldn’t imagine that here in the devastation of Johnstown all that was about to change.
Clara Barton had found her calling during the Civil War. Not only did she raise money during that war to buy and transport nursing and medical supplies for wounded Union soldiers, she also somehow got personally close to the action. Women were never allowed there, but Barton performed hands-on nursing and deployed, under her own direct command, the distribution of supplies and nursing. She quickly became invaluable, and she gained official U.S. Army permission to operate just behind the deadliest front lines of the war at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and other scenes of vast, gruesome carnage. Not only did she actively tend, with her own hands, the most grotesque injuries of that war, but she briskly managed all logistics of relief.
After the war, she parlayed her legend into an organization with some funding. Traveling in Europe, she helped the Swiss Red Cross set up military hospitals during the Franco-Prussian War and began to see what an organization focused solely on medical care could achieve. She was decorated by Prussia for those efforts. Learning of Europe’s Geneva Convention, protecting noncombatants and setting humane rules for warfare, she brought that treaty home and presented it to President James Garfield: the U.S. Senate ratified the Geneva Convention in 1882, during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur. Amid that success, Barton founded the organization first known as the U.S. Red Cross of the Geneva Convention.
That all took a long time. By the time she’d finally succeeded in her relentless effort to get the Red Cross up and running in the United States, she was sixty-one years old. And yet Miss Barton, as she was always known, remained tireless both in pursuing relief projects and in commanding her new organization. Her headquarters now was in Washington, D.C., and from there she’d led teams in bringing relief to famine and cyclone victims. She and her team knew how to put out an appeal, raise money, and organize delivery and distribution on a pretty big scale.
The Johnstown Flood would put those skills to the test on a whole new level. And it would put the Red Cross on the map.
The last thing Miss Barton could have known, when she first got the news about the disaster in Johnstown, on the morning of Sunday, June 2, was that it was about to change the national status of her organization. What she and her team had to do was verify whatever they could about the extent of the destruction, pack and plan as best they could, establish rough communication plans with their D.C. headquarters, and lay out a preliminary fundraising plan. That afternoon Miss Barton and five others splashed their way down to Washington’s Union Station—the rain still hung on; much of the east coast was now inundated—and boarded a train bound for Johnstown.
They made slow progress. Track had been washed out in many places. They didn’t arrive for forty-eight hours.
What they encountered on arrival was like nothing Miss Barton or anyone on her team had seen before. Each of the war zones and famine scenes and natural disasters in which she’d served had been uniquely awful. But Johnstown had been destroyed in the way that only later wars would make possible: nobody had ever seen an entire city laid waste all at once like this, nobody had ever seen the kind of wreckage that can be caused by 20 million tons of water dropped on top of a city full of people. The cleanup and feeding and clothing and burial had been under way for only hours at this point. The wreckage at the bridge still burned. This degree of misery was shocking even to Clara Barton.
She and her team began climbing their way over wreckage and wading through mud, on a quest to find General Hastings. They’d been told he was the person most in charge here. Miss Barton took everything in as they went, and while she would end up staying in Johnstown longer than she’d ever stayed at any other disaster site—it would be five months, and cold autumn, before she would see her home again—it was the shock of that first day she would never forget. In constant drizzle, she was climbing up broken locomotives, letting herself down over heaped-up iron-rolling machines, getting around bent rails, avoiding barbed wire. The team went past people carrying corpses out of the wreckage, animal carcasses. They could smell the acrid smoke, and the slime of the muddy water, and they knew the fear that must have struck the already terrorized survivors: disease. Miss Barton saw that all the businesses were destroyed or closed, the electric light out, most of the money in the bank vaults gone to the river bottoms.
And she saw that thousands had nowhere to sleep, nowhere to get warm, not enough clothing. She continued on her way, intent on finding General Hastings.
Hastings was a military gentleman of the old school. Confronted by this strange little woman, obviously here in hopes of somehow helping, and speaking what sounded to him something like gibberish, his only thought was to do right by her.
Mentally the general now therefore added to his endless list of tasks some means of making this poor lone thing, who would be helpless in a place like this, as comfortable as possible. The general gallantly assured her that he would find every means of helping her and her friends.
Miss Barton did her best to clarify. This was the Red Cross. They didn’t need to be helped. They were here to help, and they knew how to do so.
Hastings looked at her as if she were speaking another language. Nothing about Clara Barton fit anything he’d ever considered possible.
Instead of trying to convince him of anything, Miss Barton and her team got down to work. They’d been joined on the way by members of their Philadelphia chapter, bringing tents and cots so they could make camp. The Red Cross set up a headquarters of its own in the mud, using a crate for a desk, and began by receiving and distributing the trainloads of supplies their headquarters back in Washington had already begun raising and having sent in huge volumes. The raising of Red Cross volunteers had begun, too.
One huge tent served as the Red Cross warehouse. Over the ensuing days, the growing team took delivery of packages of food and clothing, went through them in the warehouse, and started a process of handing things out to people lining up to get them. The rain kept coming down: it was hard to keep things dry. The dynamiting was going on, yet for weeks a cart couldn’t even pass in the street, so everything had to be humped and schlepped on the backs of strong men from the train station and in and out of the big tent warehouse.
Yet soon this seemingly impromptu crew known as the Red Cross, its team swelled to hundreds of volunteers, had in many ways superseded the Pittsburgh Relief Committee and the state commission in organizing the feeding, medical care, clothing, and shelter of the suffering. This organization seemingly self-created and self-appointed, part of no government or army or police force, was turning, during its five months in Johnstown, into the nationally recognized institution that it would soon become.
Something Miss Barton took on for the first time in Johnstown was the building of quick, temporary shelters. Her idea wasn’t just to get shelters up but also to outfit each of them with cooking facilities, beds, chairs, and tables. The Red Cross took on some of the building, the commission took on the rest, but the Red Cross furnished all of the structures so people could live there. The commission put up three thousand simple structures. The Red Cross furnished those but also built “Red Cross hotels”: six buildings one hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, actual hotels, with services, housing thousands of people at little or no cost to them.
All that took ordering, inventory, bookkeeping. Money was raised, of course, but big companies around the country donated in kind, too: beds, bedding, enameled cookware, chairs, all coming in by train. Newspapers raised money to buy cooking utensils in the thousands. The furnishings were taken delivery of at the station, hauled to the tents, and marked down in ledger books that also recorded the name of each family staying in each of the dwellings and a list of each thing they were given. Along with everything else the Red Cross did well under wildly adverse conditions came bookkeeping. General Hastings began to get what was going on.
Soon, to Tom L. Johnson’s total dismay, there was too much money in Johnstown.
The relief effort, as organized by the Pittsburgh committee, the state commission, and the Red Cross, and aided by endless, ubiquitous press coverage from coast to coast—Johnstown was all that people everywhere talked about for months—became so successful that an amazing amount of stuff came into the city from big donors, ordinary people, church groups, companies, chambers of commerce, and every other imaginable source everywhere in America. Relief committees had been appointed in cities and large towns, and people everywhere seemed eager to contribute not only supplies, and not only money to buy supplies, but straight cash, adding up to an astonishing amount that was hard to keep perfect track of. The question soon facing the various committees was what to do with it.
Much of both supply and cash came through Pittsburgh: people around the country knew that the wealthy families there were organizing relief, and the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce took on the role of financial agent for managing cash donations. In Johnstown itself, the finance committee appointed at the Fourth Ward School on the day after the flood took charge of receiving that money from Pittsburgh and elsewhere. So as the electricity was restored, and the telegraph operated, and the dead were buried, and the newspaper came out, and ways were cut for passage through the pile, the finance committee faced this new, weird problem of how to handle all the money. The problem became another source of friction among the survivors, and between citizens of Johnstown as a whole and the outside entities that wanted to dictate to them the terms of their own relief.
It took only a portion of that money to pay for the monumental relief work that was being done. Much of that work was paid for elsewhere or provided voluntarily. Rumor had it, more or less correctly, that $3 million had been sent in. About $1 million got spent on relief. The money had been sent as charity, to go to people in need, and distribution of the remainder had to begin.
But Governor Beaver had started receiving questions from donors about how the money was being distributed. So he appointed yet another state entity, to be overseen by him: the Flood Relief Commission, in charge of controlling and distributing the money. This commission included not one citizen of Johnstown. The governor and this new commission sent word throughout the country that all cash contributions to Johnstown should now go exclusively to the commission, which soon determined that it would set up a system for paying about $250,000 of that cash to indemnify people, not only in Johnstown but also elsewhere in the region, for loss of property during the record-high spring flooding.
That idea was received with indignation in Johnstown. The money hadn’t been sent to insure property owners against spring flood damage: such damage had occurred many times before and nobody had sent money. The money was charity, in response to the destruction of towns and the city by a lake that had poured down when the South Fork dam burst, leaving the city nearly nonexistent, homes gone, clothing gone, thousands dead, survivors bereaved. Using it to pay for general flood damage throughout the region was a total denial of what had happened, a denial of the deaths of so many, of the desperate condition of the people, and of the purpose of the money to help people made destitute by a horrifying disaster.
In response to all this complaint, Johnstown’s own finance committee made an official request to the governor for the funds, and the state commission did authorize the committee to make a distribution of ten dollars per capita to the entire citizenry. The committee did so.
But a meeting was also held in Johnstown to address this untoward issue. The staid Rev. Beale and the maverick Tom L. Johnson were agreed: indemnifying people for losses is not the purpose of a charitable fund. People spoke against the governor’s commission. One of the most insulting things was the commission’s requiring a signed oath from the citizens detailing their losses, in answers to questions on a form, in order to get a distribution. This seemed inquisitorial.
Still, arriving at a good way to distribute all this money seemed elusive. If you give the most to people who can prove they’ve lost the most, you’re rewarding the better-off at the expense of the poor, and the better-off might have other resources that you don’t know about. If you give more to the poorer people, you have some responsibility to ascertain that they’re as poor as they say they are, a prying and humiliating prospect. Tom Johnson, fed up with the whole money issue, took pleasure in startling the meeting by proposing that all the money be converted into silver dollars, loaded on wagons, then hauled out and dumped into the streets, where the people could scramble for it. That, he suggested, would have a result at least as fair as anything this long, boring discussion could arrive at. Johnson wanted the issue handled quickly—really, he wanted it to go away—because he felt this extra-money issue was distracting the citizenry from all of the other matters that were still pressing: cleanup, rebuilding. The problem of too much money offended him. He wished people hadn’t sent it.
In his later account, the Reverend Beale simply ignored Tom’s oddball proposal. The meeting did go on, and in the end the committee created a less inquisitorial system—a number of the requirements were waived—for reimbursing the neediest, giving each person who applied a certain percentage of their estimated losses. The claimants were ranked by classes, with those considered, in the ethos of the day, the most vulnerable getting the most, and the least vulnerable getting nothing, in this order: those made widows by the flood with children; those made widows with no children; the aged, decrepit, and injured; those who had lost all their property who weren’t widows; those who had sustained considerable loss; and young persons able to take care of themselves, along with persons who had a lot left. The distribution was made in two phases, a smaller chunk first, and then, with the classes even more granularly broken down, the balance of all the money.
Tom Johnson was just glad that the issue had finally been resolved. To him, this focus on money seemed way off the important point. All the money in the world wasn’t going to bring back the dead or comfort the living. The event never should have happened in the first place. What kept getting lost, in dividing suffering by class and category, is that this thing had happened, and was still happening, not to classes and categories but to real people.