THE SOUTH FORK FISHING AND HUNTING CLUB SOON FOLDED. Not only was there no lake, but the club was nationally infamous now, associated with horrible destruction, and the cottages and boardwalks and clubhouse were hardly any place for relaxation and recreation.
The clubhouse did open for the summer of 1889, with the new indoor-plumbing system largely in place, but it had little appeal, and over time the cottages were simply abandoned. A caretaker lived in the clubhouse, but the place where amateur theatricals and band music and bass fishing had gone on during the summers of the 1880s became a kind of ghost resort.
In early 1904, the club’s organization dissolved, too, with an auction sale of everything still in the clubhouse. The auction was held up on the mountain, at the clubhouse itself; people went up and bid on the contents of fifty bedroom suites, yards and yards of carpet, silverware engraved with the club monogram, all kinds of furniture. Shortly afterward, coal was discovered in the ground below the clubhouse, where the lake had been, and in 1907, the Maryland Coal Company sank a shaft there, put managers in some of the old cottages, and built new worker housing. For a long time the clubhouse operated as a hotel and bar.
By the time of the clubhouse auction, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick had consolidated all of Carnegie’s steel ventures into one mighty company. What had begun as the Edgar Thomson Works at Braddock, near Pittsburgh, had already spread to the nearby Homestead and Duquesne works. Now Frick’s vision was to conglomerate those three mills with others they’d bought and form the Carnegie Steel Company, with a fifteen-story steel showplace of a headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh. That move created one of the biggest companies so far, in the monopoly approach to capitalism that was beginning to draw the concerned attention of reformers.
Even as Carnegie and Frick were making that move, a strike broke out, as they used to say, at the Homestead mill. Really, it didn’t break out: that was how most strikes had occurred before, in sudden, ad hoc uprisings of infuriated workers. The Homestead Strike was especially disconcerting to Carnegie and Frick because it was planned. It was organized. It was led by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, the craft union for the skilled laborers in the mills.
For years Frick had been hoping to break that organization. After an earlier strike, the union had essentially taken over and was running the works; Frick believed its rules were badly limiting productivity. Now he saw his chance.
Carnegie, busy traveling the world in advanced and high-minded circles, had proclaimed his support for labor unions, even sometimes called himself a socialist. But union rules at Homestead had been putting more men to work than he considered necessary. Cost-cutting was always Carnegie’s chief concern, and abstract support for labor didn’t mean that the union could be further tolerated at Homestead. That’s why Carnegie had Frick.
In one of the most famous showdowns in American history, Frick made his move. He locked out the workers, hired scabs, cut off collective bargaining, and brought in the notorious Pinkerton Agency, a mercenary military and police force. War broke out in July 1892—literally, as the workers and Pinkertons exchanged gun and cannon fire in a bloody battle—and even with some of the Pinkertons in surrender, Frick declined to negotiate to end the fighting. He knew that if the battle went on, the governor would send in troops.
The governor did: six thousand troops came to Homestead. The anarchists and free-love advocates Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman came too, hoping to assassinate Frick, and when Berkman made the attempt, Frick won the war. In the wake of the assassination attempt, support for the union and the strike, even among other labor leaders, dried up, and the Amalgamated Association soon became a nonentity at the Homestead works and weakened quickly at other shops as well.
So Carnegie Steel flourished, largely under Frick’s management. Soon they’d captured, as Carnegie liked to put it, 25 percent of the nation’s steel market. They sold the company in 1901, to the financier J. P. Morgan, and that was the biggest transaction, and the biggest industry consolidation, up to that point in history. Morgan’s resulting company, U.S. Steel, combined Carnegie Steel with the Federal Steel and the National Steel companies in a buyout totaling $492 million—more than $14.02 billion in 2018 terms—with a capitalization of $1 billion and Frick’s man Charles Schwab in charge. That first billion-dollar company became known on Wall Street simply as “the Corporation.”
For U.S. Steel made no pretense of creativity, innovation, or even efficiency. The pitch to investors was hugeness, the sheer, overwhelming dominance of the Corporation, with total control of two-thirds of American steel production and an anticipation of possibly one day controlling it all. J. P. Morgan wasn’t, putting it mildly, a steel man. He was a moneyman, and what a moneyman he was.
It didn’t work out perfectly. Schwab went over to the competitor Bethlehem Steel—also intent on dominance—where things were more fun: the smaller conglomerate did have to innovate to compete. As early as 1911, U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel were pretty much splitting the American market. In the process, however, Andrew Carnegie, having gotten out of steel with a staggering payoff, became far richer than he’d ever been before. It was in the early twentieth century that he really started giving his money away and doing good.
One of the things Tom L. Johnson learned from the Johnstown Flood was that he disliked charity. Tom’s frustration with the process of distributing all the extra money that had come into Johnstown was based on a frustration with certain aspects of human nature.
Nobody had worked harder to dig out the city than Tom, and nobody had a higher appreciation for those like Captain Bill Jones, who rolled up their sleeves and set to work to help. Tom was amazed and impressed by the speed of recovery that came from the massive group effort. He wasn’t against help; he wasn’t even against what he knew were the generous impulses that made people want to send money and supplies.
But Tom had been struck, during the Johnstown recovery, by what he saw as a weird human inconsistency. People complacently tolerated the daily horrors of poverty that were marking the end of the nineteenth century: child labor, the overworking and underpaying of women. Among the more prosperous classes, there didn’t seem to be much sympathy for those sufferings. When a horrible situation was normal, people just accepted it and looked away. Yet in response to the unusual, to news—earthquakes, fires, kidnappings—sympathy exploded in a kind of maniacal flood of its own. When an event of that kind jumped from the headlines, the entire American public would empty its purses and wallets and smash its children’s piggy banks to blanket the victims in financial mercy. Tom had seen that in the reaction to Johnstown.
But there would be no need for all this frenzied pity if there were no special privilege, no free rein for greed. That had become Tom’s view. Charity could do nothing to restore children to parents, heal broken hearts, or bring back lost lives. The Johnstown disaster never would have happened in the first place if commonsense restraints had been placed on privilege. What really irritated Tom, as the city rebuilt, and as it seemed to become miraculously even stronger and better than before, was hearing people say that, in the end, “the flood was a good thing for Johnstown.” People said that about the Chicago fire, too, and about other disasters from which cities made impressive recoveries.
But real people had died in Johnstown, by the thousands. Losses like that couldn’t be recovered by material good. The way Tom saw it, the Johnstown Flood had made it literally true that special privilege destroys life and causes unutterable pain. Had there been a way to prevent the rich men on the mountain from making a lake on their own passing whim, or, if they had to make a lake, to require them to build and maintain a proper dam to hold it in, there would have been no need for charity at all.
So the failure, in the end, was with human government. Tom didn’t hate charity itself. He hated the human preference for tinkering forever, as he put it, with a defective spigot when the bunghole is wide open. Finding the cause instead of responding to symptoms, using the collective power of democratically elected government to repair the cause and render charity unnecessary: that offered the only hope for the American future that Tom could see.
When he became the mayor of Cleveland in 1901, nationally famous as one of the first progressive mayors of a major American city, Tom L. Johnson began to do just that. He held office for four terms and changed everything about the way Cleveland operated. He brought his natural ebullience to bear: as mayor, Tom became famous for, among other things, striding into the city’s most elegant public park, pulling up a “Do Not Walk on the Grass” sign, and tearing it up, to loud public acclaim. He kept his sense of humor and his idiosyncratic attitude, and when he was done governing, it was the municipality, not private franchises, that delivered essential services. Tom L. Johnson had gone from a dedicated monopolist to what might have seemed to some a wild-eyed socialist. But what he really did in Cleveland, directly inspired by the horror of the 1889 Johnstown Flood, was create a modern, working city.
In Johnstown, Tom’s partner Arthur Moxham led the related fight to modernize the city by consolidating its fragmented government. Further terrible flooding would plague Johnstown. Yet the event of a huge private lake dropping down on the city, solely because of the lake’s owners’ disregard, had been eminently preventable. It hadn’t been prevented, in the view of Moxham and Johnson and others, because efforts at prevention had been left to conversations among leading citizens: Daniel Morrell’s personally expressing displeasure. Benjamin Ruff’s blowing him off.
Blame in that sense lay, to Moxham, with Johnstown itself. The political citizenry had engaged in what he called “criminal irresponsibility.” The facts had been known: a dangerous body of water existed, and nobody trusted the dam that held it back. Yet the whole community—as a community—hadn’t even investigated the situation. No organization had existed, representative of the community as a whole, with the power to do so. Had there been such an entity, the South Fork dam would have been dealt with long since, and what happened to everybody in the valley on May 31 wouldn’t have happened. It was that stark, that simple.
Strong words. Regulating big dams now seemed like a good idea, and without a government to do so, the regulation couldn’t occur. In the very spring of the recovery, Johnstown was chartered as a city.
The Cambria company more than recovered, and the smoking, sparking, and roaring of its long brick buildings and high stacks only spread down the river. The valley’s industrial might began amplifying to the extraordinary proportions that would make western Pennsylvania a major commercial and industrial center for much of the twentieth century. As the region not only recovered but kept booming, consolidation of big-scale industry came to Johnstown in 1916, when Cambria was bought by the Midvale Steel and Ordnance Company. In 1923, Midvale sold the works to Bethlehem. Charles Schwab, having begun under Carnegie, and having then gone to U.S. Steel in the buyout, had made Bethlehem the second-largest steel company in the world, and the company’s famous Johnstown Works would operate until 1992.
There was just something special about the story of the Johnstown Flood. Maybe the power it wielded for so many years over the American imagination came from its status as the biggest national story after the close of the Civil War. Maybe the protest against the heedless rich that the flood engendered served as a sign of new times. Maybe the story resonated with a widespread anxiety over big industry and the enormity of the things that could go wrong now. But whatever the factors, and there were probably many, the story of the Johnstown Flood quickly took on a life of its own that would forever set it apart, in American popular culture, from other disaster stories, even from worse ones to come.
Disaster tourism had always existed. After the flood, it exploded in Johnstown. Even while the citizens and the committees and the commissions were trying to clean up and provide relief, under enormous logistical and emotional pressure, trains were bringing in passenger cars full of tourists hoping to snatch up objects, or just to gawk at the astonishing misery and destruction that lay about them. These visitors were unwelcome, to say the least, but it was hard to keep them out.
Troops were stationed at the pontoon bridge, and later at the partially repaired stone bridge, to ensure that nobody came into town who didn’t have business there. But hundreds of coffins were being sent from Pittsburgh for use by the Reverend Beale’s morgues, and that gave the tourists an idea. They started carrying coffins, and they gained entry that way.
Having arrived, most didn’t help. They watched, and they took things. One souvenir hunter saw a wooden leg sticking out of the pile and went after the trophy. As he and his friends dug and pulled at it, they found the leg was attached to a dead body. Others just stood around and gathered stories. There were so many moving sights to see, to take home and tell friends about, proof of having been right there in Johnstown.
Stories of devoted motherhood were big in 1880s America, and many victims of the flood, as their bodies were pulled from the wreckage, gave testimony to that devotion. Entire dead families were found together, and sometimes the mother seemed to be firmly holding a baby even in death. One still had her baby at the breast. Two sisters were found locked in an embrace. Some of these things were real, others exaggerated or invented, but the eager tourists, packing back onto the passenger cars to get out of there at the end of the day, didn’t care. They’d been there. They’d seen it.
Not everybody with a desire to experience the Johnstown Flood could actually get there and see it. An entire industry quickly developed to satisfy their needs. It wasn’t just the constant newspaper coverage, dredging up story after story. Whole books started coming out right away. One was titled The Johnstown Horror!!! or Valley of Death: Being a Complete and Thrilling Account of the Awful Floods and Their Appalling Ruin, Containing Graphic Descriptions of the Terrible Rush of Waters; the Great Destruction of Houses, Factories, Churches, Towns . . . (and it actually went on from there).
That was probably the most extreme, but it was a bestseller, and the idea behind all of these books was the same. Most came out only months after the flood, when the real city was still a wasteland and there had been no time to assess what actually happened.
Photographers too came to town and set up their big, boxy cameras and came away with troves of images that started showing up on 3-D viewers, postcards, and as illustrations for the books. Books that couldn’t get photos had paintings and engravings. Traveling showmen projected flood images on walls—the “magic lantern”—and gave fanciful lectures on the event. Poetry was a highly popular medium then, and poets went at the flood with gusto. The New York World commissioned Walt Whitman, America’s greatest poet of the day, to crank something out, and Whitman may have surprised his sponsor by writing, as usual, something highly counterintuitive:
War, Death, cataclysm like this, America,
Take Deep to thy proud, prosperous heart.
Many lesser lights wrote more accessible Johnstown poems.
All that was just at first blush. With time, things really got ambitious. The big thing became Johnstown Flood reenactments, with a feeling, anyway, of audience participation. In 1901, at Coney Island, the world-famous bayside amusement park in Brooklyn, New York, exhibitors built a giant, turreted castle on Surf Avenue, above whose big, Gothic-arched doorway the words JOHNSTOWN FLOOD invited the curious inside. The show—it had come straight from the Buffalo, New York, world’s fair, where it had been a sensation—featured a cyclorama, with scenes acted out in front of gigantic panoramic paintings: movies hadn’t yet taken off, and this effect was riveting for both realism and spectacle. Real water poured, and electrical sound effects—explosions, booming, grinding—made the audience jump and scream. The show ran for a number of years. In her early twenties, Gertrude Quinn saw the Coney Island show on a trip to New York. The show didn’t do much for Gertrude, not surprisingly, but it was such a big hit that in 1906 the impresarios upped the ante and decided to do the story of Noah’s ark instead, with not Johnstown, Pennsylvania, but the whole world getting destroyed, and not just by flood but by earthquake and fire, too; why not? Meanwhile similar Johnstown shows went on at the White City exposition in Chicago, Atlantic City in New Jersey, and elsewhere.
These shows and books and paintings made use of thrilling stories that weren’t true. A favorite and lasting one was the story of the Paul Revere of Johnstown. This fable had been concocted right after the flood itself, and always involved, in its various versions, a courageous young man who galloped his horse down the valley immediately ahead of the great wave, calling out a warning and thus saving thousands of lives before being tragically overtaken by the flood and drowned. That this act would have been physically impossible made no difference. It was too good to be true, but too good not to believe.
Another good one was drawn from the death of Hetty Ogle, the telegraph operator who had stayed at her post until the office got too deep in the water. Mrs. Ogle had finally left the office and gone up to the third floor. She died there, with her daughter, when the wave hit town. But before she’d left she’d tapped out “This is my last message,” and while she’d meant only that it was her last of the day, in the story of Hetty Ogle, heroine, she’d been tapping out warnings and saving lives even as the wave was rampaging through town. And she’d known that would be her last message ever.
Meanwhile, a trove of songs were placing the Johnstown Flood in the American pop archive. These songs were sold as sheet music, to be sung at home to the accompaniment of a parlor piano, but they were also passed around and changed and embellished by musicians learning them by ear and playing along on guitars, jugs, and other less expensive instruments. The “sentimental song” was a genre, meaning a song invoking strong feelings, and so was the “event song,” usually describing some recent disaster. Johnstown was fodder for both, and songs with titles like “That Valley of Tears” and “My Last Message” were popular. A song titled simply “The Johnstown Flood” made the Paul Revere of Johnstown its hero.
The most mysterious of the flood songs may be “The Night of the Johnstown Flood,” mentioned in the 1982 song (“Highway Patrolman”) by Bruce Springsteen. While no song with that title had existed when the Springsteen song was released, people inspired by its mention have written some.
Victor Heiser became a doctor. Having first hoped to be a watchmaker, he worked as a carpenter and a plumber and ended up attending Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Fluent in four languages, for a time he worked checking immigrants for infectious diseases at Ellis Island, and when American military forces took over the Philippines in 1898 he was appointed director of health for the island group. Victor oversaw what was known as the Culion Leper Colony: “the island of no return,” with at times five thousand patients and two hundred doctors.
After being relieved of duty there, between 1903 and 1915, he oversaw the creation of the entire public health system for the American Philippines, with a major focus on treating leprosy. After that, he worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, traveling the world promoting public health and fighting not only leprosy but also smallpox, plague, cholera, malaria, and beriberi.
Early in his career, Victor Heiser had set a personal goal. He would save fifty thousand lives per year from preventable diseases. He died in 1972. People said that in the end, he might have saved more than two million.
Like Victor Heiser, the Reverend David Beale left Johnstown not long after the flood. During the grueling recovery effort, he’d volunteered his Presbyterian church for use as a morgue, and the church board, offended, scolded him for having failed to ask permission. Beale, his back up, argued that it had seemed the obvious and the Christian thing to do, but there was no compromise. He left town to serve elsewhere.
The great steel man Captain Bill Jones arrived home in Pittsburgh after his two straight weeks of hard work in the Johnstown recovery and went back to work at Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson Works. In late September of that year, he was inspecting a faulty furnace when it broke, pouring down hot coal and metal. Bill, badly burned, fell and struck his head. He died at the Homeopathic Hospital in Pittsburgh. His funeral was attended not only by Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick and steel executives of every other company but also by about ten thousand steelworkers.
Thanks to its amazingly successful efforts in Johnstown, the Red Cross became nationally known as the leading relief organization in the country. Clara Barton would go on to bring massive relief to the Russian famine, the Sea Islands hurricane, and the Armenian massacres. Her final trip, taken when she was seventy-eight, was in relief of the destruction by hurricane of the city of Galveston, Texas, in 1900, which she would say dwarfed anything she’d seen before, even Johnstown: Galveston would remain the worst natural disaster in American history—though it had its shameful human element, too—for at least the ensuing 117 years. At the age of eighty-three, Barton was forced to give up leadership of the Red Cross, and she died in 1912.
General Hastings, for his part, gobsmacked by yet ever courteous to Miss Barton throughout the whole Johnstown endeavor, ran for governor of Pennsylvania in 1890 but failed to get the Republican nomination. In 1894 he did get it, defeated the Democratic nominee, and served one term.
Strangely enough, Gertrude Quinn and Max McCachren never saw one another again after her rescue. Class distinctions were rigid: nobody on either side would necessarily have thought it appropriate for the little girl and the big house painter who had carried her downstream that crazy night, and thrown her through the air, to have a reunion.
They thought of one another often. Max liked to drop by the Quinns’ new store, and he and James and Rosina Quinn would relive the rescue: James would often slip Max five dollars from the till in a celebration of the event. Gertrude did see the Metz family that had taken her in—she often happily carried gifts from the store to their house—but as an adult she came to consider it one of the great regrets of her life that she’d never seen Max again.
She was living in another town, Gertrude Slattery now, with children of her own, when she saw his obituary notice in the Johnstown Tribune. She sent dark red roses. Gertrude’s younger sister Eulalia, living in Johnstown, went to the funeral home to pay respects: the family had placed the roses on his casket. Max’s family sent Gertrude his picture, and she never parted from it.
Back when Max was making his regular visits to the new Quinn store, Papa came home one day and told Gertrude—then in her teens—that Max had once again been going over that night on the raft, and he’d told James of a great feeling of joy and love that had filled his heart, as the little girl had put both arms around his neck and held on to him for dear life.
“You may tell Mr. McCachren for me,” Gertrude told Papa, “the next time you see him, that I said: ‘When I’m grown up and meet the man I love, and put my arms around his neck, I am sure his neck will never feel as fine to my arms as the burly, unshaven neck of Maxwell McCachren, the brave Scotchman who risked his life to save me from the greatest flood since Noah’s’!”