Greed
The morning of March 26, New Castle, Pennsylvania
The city slowly came to a standstill. The Shenango River didn’t rush onto the streets like the Miami River rushed into Dayton and other towns, but it came nonetheless. School was called off, the electric light plant was flooded, the city water had been turned off, and just as it was unfolding in communities throughout states in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast, people were stuck on second stories and roofs without food and clean drinking water. It was estimated that at least one thousand homes were flooded, and police, firemen, and volunteer rescuers were manning boats and trying to help people to safety.
But some police officers had a funny way of helping people. It wouldn’t become public knowledge until later, but at some point on Wednesday, a few officers apparently decided that their salary wasn’t high enough.
Constable William Kerr asked resident John Standard, who lived on Mahoning Avenue, dangerously close to the river, for two dollars before allowing him on his boat.
“I only have one dollar,” said Standard.
“All right, give me that,” said Kerr.
Standard, who must have been fuming inside, fished a dollar out of his pocket and handed it to a red-haired police officer at the front of the boat who then gave it to Kerr, at the rear of the boat. Standard was far from the only person asked to pay passage before being ferried to safety. Peter Kowalcruck, also of Mahoning Avenue, was also told he needed to fork over money. He and five other men asked Kerr for a ride away from Kowalcruck’s house and was told: “If you have got a dollar, we’ll come back and take you out.” The officers came back, and the six men gave them six dollars.
Walter VanHorn, a 37-year-old Mexican or Spanish immigrant who is said to have not known much English, was told the going rate for being saved from the flood was five dollars, a whopping sum for someone of his socioeconomic status. VanHorn, who worked as a steamfitter at a steel mill, paid up. He had a wife and three kids to worry about.
Dominick Dimucco of Center Street also paid five dollars, to a man who didn’t have a uniform on, in order to get his sister, her husband, and their seven children out of their house. He claimed it was a fireman and one other man who insisted on receiving money for transporting his family, although in court he would acknowledge that the fireman himself didn’t take the money and may have been unaware of what was going on around him.
Whoever was receiving the money, profiteering was a sad reality. William Kerr and several other men of authority were benefiting, particularly from ethnic minorities and women, who they believed wouldn’t speak out, and the price kept going up with the water. It later came out that on Preston Avenue—which is no longer in existence—people were being charged twenty-five dollars each before being taken out of their flooded homes in boats provided by the city.
Naturally, some people, honest and not, used the flood as an excuse to make a buck. The Morris Bros., a store that specialized in selling candy, ice cream, magazines, and newspapers in Van Wert, Ohio, began advertising their souvenir postcards of the flood on March 28 when much of the community was still underwater. The ads appeared on page three of the Van Wert Daily Bulletin, three columns over from the daily column with the headline DEATHS AND FUNERALS. Readers could learn how Mrs. F. A. Ward was fifty years old and a victim of the “terrible flood,” and of how the body of Nolan McElroy, who drowned with Charles Morris and two horses in a flooded quarry near Ada, Ohio, had just been found. Then, if they were feeling nostalgic, they could go over to the Morris Brothers for some of their famous oysters and some postcards featuring flood scenes.
Nobody in town was particularly surprised that the Morris Brothers would find a way to profit off the flood. After all, J. W. Morris, the oldest of the brothers, had been in trouble with the law, complete with a warrant for his arrest, just a few years earlier for making some sales on a Sunday.
In May of 1913, in Titusville, Pennsylvania and undoubtedly other papers in the area, the First National Bank of Warren ran an advertisement, noting that when their city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania had its nefarious flood “24 years ago, the 31st of May, many people who saved their lives not only lost their household furniture and personal effects, but their money, as many families had money hidden about the house. In the recent flood here,” the ad continued, “in our own state and in the states of Indiana and Ohio, there was a smaller percentage of loss of currency, but a number of cases have come to our notice where money secreted about the home was washed away or destroyed.”
So the bank was literally trying to use the flood to drum up business, but at least their message—your money is safer in the bank—had the virtue of being true.
Picture houses, in the days, weeks, and months after the flood, helped to draw in crowds by promoting footage of the flood. “As usual, the management of the Jefferson put one over by securing the Dayton Flood Pictures and showing them FIRST,” boasted an ad in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette on April 4. “Note: If it is WORTH showing, the JEFFERSON will have it FIRST.”
You might think that the Fort Wayne public had seen plenty of water in person, but the management of the Jefferson certainly didn’t think so, splashing the Dayton Flood Pictures at the top of an ad, which then told potential moviegoers about their other films that weekend, including The Clown’s Revenge, a Danish film short (with sixty scenes, the ad promised) and Bachelor Bill’s Birthday Present, a comedy starring Edwin August, who had a thriving film career during the silent era but, by the time of the talkies, would be reduced to playing extras in Hollywood films, some of them classics like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Magnificent Ambersons.
“A big special feature program has been arranged for the auditorium tomorrow which contains six reels of pictures and thirty-six views of the Ohio floods all shown to these delightful strains of music rendered by Schmidt’s orchestra,” announced an article in the Newark Advocate, the paper of record for Newark, Ohio on April 12. The following day in the same town, at the Orpheum, guests would “have a rare treat in store for them when 2,500 feet of flood pictures will be shown. These are moving pictures of the different Ohio cities that suffered from the recent high waters. The films have been receiving the highest praises wherever shown, and every Newark resident should take advantage of these pictures being brought to this city.” A three-reel feature would also be shown. Admission, only a dime.
It wasn’t just Ohio and Indiana theatres trying to pull the public in with disaster voyeurism. Around the country, theatres were touting their flood pictures. In San Antonio, Texas’s paper the San Antonio Light, an article promoting the Wigwam Theatre raved about the new flood footage that Pathé’s Weekly, the first American newsreel, would be showing. “This week’s Pathé will be unusually interesting because of the fact that pictures of the recent floods in Dayton and other Ohio towns will be shown as well as scenes taken in Omaha shortly after the tornado there.”
In an age when television news didn’t exist, nor radio, many people around the country who had family and friends in the flood zone naturally craved information about the disaster. It would have been a disservice not to promote the flood pictures, and yet one can smell the greed when the article continues, “When Pathé’s Weekly shows pictures, they are good. It is obvious, then, that you will see the best flood pictures yet shown.”
On March 30, when many cities were finally drying out but some were still losing citizens to the unforgiving waters, the International Bible House in Philadelphia put on an ad in the Indianapolis Star, the Fort Wayne News, and other cities affected by the flood, and plenty that weren’t, in states as far away as Montana, explaining that “agents can make $10 to $20 selling $1 book on ‘Horrible Disaster by Flood and Tornado,’ greatest opportunity for agents since ‘Titanic’; enormous demand for authentic book; 350 pages, 50 illustrations. Representatives sent to scene of disaster for true account and photographs of appalling calamity. Big profits for agents who begin at once. Part of publishers profits contributed to Red Cross relief fund; purchasers thus help sufferers; highest commission, 50 percent of better; freight paid; credit given; extra inducements to general agents or crew managers; outfit free. Act quick; be first around and make $10 to $20 a day.”
The International Bible House had competition. The J.S. Ziegler Company, in Chicago, had a similar advertisement, stating: “‘TRAGIC STORY of America’s Greatest Disaster,’ flood, wind and fire; the biggest money-maker agents ever had; $15 daily if you start now; large $1 book 100 illustrations; outfit free.” Anderson Supply, also in Chicago, had an ad running for a book called “Horrors of Ohio Flood.” Agents would buy the book for 15 cents and sell it for $1. The American Educational League, another Chicago company, didn’t mention the title of their book but promised that it was the best one out there. In Altoona, Pennsylvania, and other papers across the country, there were ads for Our National Calamity—By Flood, Fire and Tornado, by the author of “Titanic,” of which millions of copies sold, the ad raved.
The author was Logan Howard-Smith, although the ads never said that. Howard-Smith, whose pen name was Logan Marshall, knew his name wasn’t what sold. It was the tragedy. He was twenty-nine, a 1905 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and had already written the Life of Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 and the aforementioned The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters the year before. But what he did, at least with his book about the Great Flood of 1913, could hardly be called writing. Howard-Smith’s book, Our National Calamity—By Flood, Fire and Tornado, which can today be purchased on Amazon.com, was little more than copy taken from dozens of newspapers, word for word, and slapped onto pages and then bound between covers. It was gripping reading, full of juicy stories and crack reporting, all right, but he himself had hardly written a word, except perhaps for the preface of the book and a scattered number of passages or segues.
But at least Howard-Smith, store owners like the Morris Brothers, and theatre owners were giving the public what they wanted. Many more were stealing and profiting from unsuspecting flood victims during the flood itself and in its immediate aftermath, essentially blackmailing them for goods and services. One of the most heinous con artists to profit off the flood was that of Ben W. Kinsey and his army of quack doctors.
Kinsey had graduated from Jenner Medical College, then a night school with a shaky reputation, in 1909, and after running a private practice for a year, he had become an assistant and pupil of Max J. “Phenomenal” Kraus, a notorious traveling “physician,” a word that should only be loosely associated with him.
Kinsey started a company called United Doctors, a business that had a blueprint that was very similar to Kraus’s solo operation, which lacked a fancy name. Kraus advertised himself heavily in newspapers—and so did United Doctors. Kraus would alert the community that he was coming to visit soon and would be available to treat the people for whatever ailed them. In 1910, he put out word that he was in Cincinnati, negotiating to rent space in Hamilton’s largest auditorium, where he would discuss the latest forms of electric treatment in medicine. He promised that he would treat any of the members of the paying audience, who he picked out of the crowd, for free. It made for good press, and the customers who came after the first paying customer, he could gouge.
Kinsey took Kraus’s model and did him one better. He started hiring other like-minded quacks and set up scattered offices around the Midwest and like his mentor, advertised frequently in the paper, alerting the community that the United Doctors was coming to town, and those who were sick should get in line.
The ads worked. For starters, they were often paid advertorials, written like newspaper articles but fully paid for by the advertiser, who was, in this case, United Doctors. United Doctors were quick to pay their bills, which may explain why newspapers were slow to investigate claims that they were defrauding the public.
The medical community—the real physicians—were horrified. One respected journal of the time, The Railway Surgical Journal, called United Doctors “a medical parasite.” Meanwhile, the staff of the Journal of the American Medical Association believed emphatically that the people behind United Doctors were crooks. As they wrote in an article that appeared in their January-June 1913 issue, many of the doctors that Kinsey hired were of dubious character. For instance, one of them, George L. Dickerson, a physician from Indiana, had had his license revoked in part because he had loaned his medical diploma to his brother, who wasn’t a doctor. Two other “doctors,” a W. D. Rea and G. W. Bourne, had visited Lockhart, Texas in February of 1913 as part of a similar healing tour, and the American Medical Association, wanting to confirm their suspicions, sent a healthy man to be their patient.
Both Rea and Bourne said that their healthy patient had diabetes and wouldn’t live another six months unless he received treatment from them, and it was about that moment that they mentioned the cost for their care would be $45, a princely sum back then. A prosecutor then came after the doctors, who agreed to scrub all of their engagements in Texas and leave the state.
An ad that appeared in the Warsaw Union in Warsaw, Indiana, in October of 1913, was typical of the time. It read in part:
“These Doctors are among America’s leading stomach and nerve specialists, and are experts in the treatment of chronic diseases of the blood, liver, stomach, intestines, skin, nerves, heart, spleen, kidneys or bladder, rheumatism, sciatica, diabetes, bed-wetting, tape worm, leg ulcers, weak lungs, and those afflicted with long standing, deep seated chronic diseases, that have baffled the skill of other physicians, should not fail to call. Deafness has often been cured in sixty days.”
By the time any deaf person realized that they hadn’t been cured, these doctors were long gone.
They just asked that you bring a two-ounce bottle of your urine for chemical analysis and microscopic examination. And for the squeamish, there was nothing to worry about, either: the United Doctors, as their article-ads stated, “were among the first in America to earn the name of ‘bloodless surgeons,’ by doing away with the knife, with blood and with pain in the successful treatment of these dangerous diseases.”
So it was no surprise to anyone, and a great relief to the unsuspecting and desperate masses, when the United Doctors began releasing advertorials that ran in papers like Newark, Ohio. “FLOOD SUFFERERS SHOWN SPECIAL FAVORS BY THE UNITED DOCTORS,” said the headline in the Newark Advocate.
The story stated, “In view of the awful calamity that has visited the state of Ohio in the recent horrible flood, which has caused an enormous loss of life and property and thrown countless hundreds of men and women out of employment, the United Doctors have decided to throw open their doors once more to those who may be suffering and unable to take treatment owing to the flood conditions and their results.”
The article then went on to give the address of United Doctors and stated that people who showed up would receive “free consultation, advice and no charge for service whatever will be made. The only charge made will be sufficient to cover the medicine used in the treatment of the case. This is your last chance of Free Treatment and is made only because of the intense suffering caused by the flood.”
And just in case anyone wondered if they were a good candidate for United Doctors, the article finished by saying, “The United Doctors treat among other ailments Chronic and Deep-Seated diseases of the Nerves, Blood, Heart, Liver, Kidneys, Bladder, Skin, Spine, including Rheumatism, Epilepsy, Gallstones, Goitre, Constipation, Dyspepsia, Neuralgia, Dropsy, Asthma, Catarrh, Deafness, Loss of Nerve Force, Weak Lungs and Diseases of Women and Diseases of Men.”
In other words, everyone. Everyone with money for medicine, that is.
Lest one fault the newspapers for running these articles on the newspaper pages and next to flood articles, the editors often (but not always) put the initials “advt” afterward, standing for advertisement or advertorial. The editors at the Newark Advocate used the initials “s&m” at the article’s conclusion. It may have been a sadomasochistic form of journalism, but it stood for sales and marketing, a point that most readers would miss or not understand.
United Doctors’ offices would start closing within a few years, and the visits would stop, due to complaints from the public and lawmakers who started to catch on and began writing laws to stop fly-by-night medical operations; but during the flood of 1913, they ran rampant as lawmakers and other public officials were distracted with flood recovery. The incident in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, was not the only instance either of rescuers trying to profit during the flood. It is the most infamous example, given that police officers were involved, but they were hardly the only greedy rescuers.
Newspapers reported many examples of people charging for boat and carfare to get people from here or there. In Peru, Indiana, some boatmen charged several new mothers with their babies in arms five dollars to be taken from a building to dry land. In Dayton, according to one newspaper account, a husky young doctor had an argument with one man who demanded ten dollars—five per passenger—before he would bring two injured women in his car to the hospital.
The doctor didn’t have ten dollars, and the man kept insisting. Finally, the physician picked up a piece of driftwood and clocked him senseless. Then the doctor put the unconscious jerk into the car with the women, drove to the hospital, and treated all of them.
There was at least one other surgeon in Dayton—a Dr. Ray B. Harris—who couldn’t take the greed either and, in his words, “I personally thrashed two drivers who presumed to haggle.”
In Columbus, a 35-year-old undertaker by the name of O. H. Osman was arrested by the police for taking possessions off dead bodies. Osman, who three years earlier had been a telephone operator at the Columbus State Hospital, an insane asylum, was now collecting bodies—and quite a bit more. Evidently thinking that most people were as dishonest as he was, Osman approached two Ohio National Guard soldiers, Clyde McCullough and an F. L. Killworth, asking them to “throw” all the bodies possible to him, saying that he would pay them if they did.
The two guardsmen arranged a meeting with Osman at the morgue, and when they arrived, the undertaker was in the middle of telling an underling to remove the clothing off an elderly woman’s corpse and taking money out of the pockets. But instead of sealing a deal with Osman, McCullough and Killworth took the undertaker into custody.
This next tale appeared in one of the Dayton papers. It may be apocryphal, sort of a wish fulfillment story that made the rounds—but it may well be true, too. According to one news item, a Mr. Charles Thatcher, his wife Louise, and a neighbor were trapped on the floor of their house when a boatman offered to rescue them for a cost of $100 per passenger. Mr. Thatcher proposed the boatman accept $25 a person, for that’s all he had, but the offer wasn’t accepted, and they were left behind. Later, they heard a shot, presumably from another angry homeowner. A few minutes later, the Thatchers and their neighbor saw the boat float by, with the boatman slumped over, dead.