When the dam holding storm-swollen Lake Conemaugh collapsed on May 31, 1889, David McCullough writes how the result was like unleashing Niagara Falls upon the urban sprawl of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Over 2,200 people perished that day.
The survivors’ anguish turned to anger when the full reason for the unprecedented disaster was revealed. The water held by the lake wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. It was an artificial lake, a playground of privilege for Midwestern tycoons to enjoy their summers.
It was like the Titanic disaster a generation later, but in reverse; the water landing on people instead of people landing in water. Still, there was an anti-capitalist angle in both stories.
As columnist J. J. McLaurin put it: “50,000 lives in Pennsylvania were jeopardized for eight years that a club of rich pleasure-seekers might fish and sail and revel in luxurious ease during the heated term.”
Or as poet Isaac Reed versified: “All the horrors that hell could wish/Such was the price that was paid for – fish!”
There was more to blame, including massive rainfall, denuded mountains, and a primitive early warning system consisting of telegraphs and locomotive whistles. But McCullough lays most of it on a club of tycoons rich in everything but a sense of civic responsibility.
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| A stock certificate for the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club advertises the bucolic quality of the location. Locals were shooed away by armed guards, while fish were penned inside with gratings that impeded the flow of water. Image from https://pittarchives.tumblr.com/post/87388892232/125th-anniversary-of-the-johnstown-flood |
In the end, he’s with Reed and McLaurin regarding the criminal neglect of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, whose members included such captains of national industry as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. They were not evil, he makes clear, just too content with a status quo that served them fairly well in 1889.
They were not the only ones with a blasé attitude. McCullough writes: When there were warnings of trouble up the mountain, very few took them to heart. The dam always held despite the warnings. People got tired of hearing about a disaster that never happened. And after all, was not the dam owned by some of the most awesome men in the country?
As McCullough’s authorial debut, The Johnstown Flood sets the stage for his long and impressive run of popular histories. It is immediately engaging, deeply researched with an eye for telling, authentic details and a way of explaining things that is careful and thorough yet never boring. His thesis of capitalistic folly is laid out right away without being beaten into the ground. Rather, it is a human story he wants to tell.
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| Author David McCullough. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. While a keen lifelong student of history, he majored in English at Yale University. He died in 2022. Photo by Alison Shaw from https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2022/08/08/david-mccullough-chronicler-american-experience-dies-89 |
His is a familiar easy-flowing, slightly stodgy style readers of his later, better known histories like 1776 and Truman will recognize. He narrated Ken Burns’ “Civil War” series, and you hear that same voice in your head while reading this.
He starts by profiling a handful of key players, lays out the topography and takes 100 pages before getting to the disaster itself:
Even before night had ended [on May 30] there had been signs of trouble. At five o’clock a landslide had caved in the stable at Kress’s brewery, and anyone who was awake then could hear the rivers. By six everyone who was up and about knew that Johnstown was in for a bad time. The rivers were rising at better than a foot an hour. They were a threatening yellow-brown color and already full of logs and big pieces of lumber that went bounding along as though competing in some sort of frantic race.
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| A map showing Lake Conemaugh (at center right) and its relationship to the city of Johnstown (lower left). So many trees were cut down from the hills surrounding Johnstown that the water had nowhere else to go but straight into the valley where the city lay. Image from https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Great-Johnstown-Flood-1889 |
Once the flood does hit the following afternoon, McCullough captures the desperation and futility of the situation in a crisp, you-are-there way. While buildings float around them, people who could not get to higher ground hold on to what they could, praying and screaming:
The next thing she knew, Gertrude [Quinn] was whirling about on top of a muddy mattress that was being buoyed up by debris but that kept tilting back and forth as she struggled to get her balance. She screamed for help. Then a dead horse slammed against her raft, pitching one end of it up into the air and nearly knocking her off. She hung on for dear life, until a tree swung by, snagging the horse in its branches before it plunged off with the current in another direction, the dead animal bobbing up and down, up and down, in and out of the water, like a gigantic, gruesome rocking horse.
The utter randomness of the moment is repeatedly emphasized. McCullough writes about a railroad passenger car where those who grasp the danger of the water rushing toward them and run for safety are mostly killed, while every person who remained inside the car, whether from shock or fear or infirmity, were able to live through it.
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| This house, belonging to the Schultz family, was pulled up from its foundation and deposited sideways on an adjacent street. Despite its horrific appearance, McCullough notes all six people inside the dwelling survived the flood. Image from Image from https://www.reddit.com |
A lawyer named James Walters is propelled from the roof of his house, “spinning across town” until he crashes into a window and finds himself lying in the middle of his downtown office.
McCullough seems to use as his template Walter Lord’s A Night To Remember, a famous book about the Titanic published in 1955. As with Lord, McCullough’s narrative lens operates from a bird’s-eye view, providing an overview of the disaster before zooming in on various individuals as they experience their own subjective crises. You get both the totality of the disaster as well as a human angle that might otherwise be lost in the statistics.
One fascinating parallel with the Titanic tragedy: Both were anticipated in popular fiction. The 1898 novel Futility depicted the sinking of the Titan, a passenger liner which struck an iceberg. Some two decades before the Johnstown flood, the novel Put Yourself In His Place depicted a steel mill town destroyed by a burst dam.
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| The flood's aftermath, where it met the bridge (at left). According to McCullough, 99 families were entirely wiped out, while 396 children under the age of ten died. "Hands of the dead stuck out of the ruins," a local newspaperman wrote. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood |
People knew a flood could happen; many just didn’t face the possibility squarely until it finally occurred. Some, though, were proactive. McCullough describes in detail how the main industry in Johnstown itself, the Cambria Iron Company, had their expert visit the dam and report on deficiencies he had observed. The then-head of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club responded to the findings by saying it was obvious the expert didn’t know what he was talking about.
The head of the Cambria Iron Company, Daniel J. Morrell, followed up by offering to help fund improvements to the dam.
“In my judgment there should have been provided some means by which the water would be let out of the dam in case of trouble, and I think you will find it necessary to provide an outlet pipe or gate before any engineer can pronounce the job a safe one,” Morrell wrote.
The club leadership rejected this, in part because a tighter dam meant less fish could escape the manmade Lake Conemaugh. This left no release for the water once a hard rain fell. When the dam finally broke on May 31, one observer described it as “not a break, just one big push.”
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| An artist's conception of the South Fork Dam as it collapsed at approximately 3:15 PM on May 31, 1889. The gushing water took with it many trees which added to the devastation as they rolled and pinwheeled to the bottom of the valley some 1,600 feet below. Image from https://www.nps.gov/jofl/learn/historyculture/the-south-fork-dam.htm |
Club workers were left with little to do other than watch the lake wash over the valley and collect the prized fish now flapping along its bottom.
The flood’s destructive path was worsened by the lack of any warning system. Of course, the rain had been falling for hours, and in Johnstown streets were flooded. But McCullough points out several times this was not unusual, so there was little panic. When the floodwaters finally hit directly, they were almost invisible, something more heard than seen:
As one man said, it looked more like a hill of rubbish than anything else. Some people said it looked to be fifty feet high and it was taking everything in front of it.
The community of Woodvale may have gotten it the worst. It was a section of Johnstown, “a sort of model town” built by the Cambria Iron Company which lay in the direct path of the flood and got no warning of its approach. McCullough describes how boilers and tanneries were uprooted by the flood’s ferocity. “The official figure for Woodvale’s dead would later be set at 314, which means that about one out of every three people in town had been killed,” he writes.
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| The death toll from the flood came not only from drowning but fire, too. As debris began to cluster around combustible equipment, the result started lasting infernos that burned those trapped inside. "They reminded me of a lot of flies on flypaper," a witness reported. Image from https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/johnstown-flood-history-facts |
It was not the only part of Johnstown to be hard-hit, though much of the surprise after came in realizing the human toll had not been even worse. The New York World reported on the flood two days later, with the headline “10,000 DEAD.” In fact, the floodwaters were stopped short as the wreckage dragged before it slammed into a massive stone railroad bridge and jammed up. This did crush to death many already caught in the water’s flow but saved countless others sheltering in parts of the city.
McCullough also dives into the press coverage after the flood. There were heroes, like the editor of the Johnstown Tribune who recorded all that he could, and villains, like those who played up nativist fears by retailing fictions of Hungarian immigrants stealing rings and other valuables from drowned victims.
Even when the media was more responsible, he writes, hyperbole dominated: The phrase “no pen can describe...” kept cropping up again and again, but the pens kept right on describing.
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| First reports out of Johnstown stressed the worst, with between 3,000 to 10,000 dead. The reality was bad enough, but it would take the city not very long to recover its industrial strength. The recovery of survivors, both mental and physical, proved more challenging. Image from https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2014/05/31/not-a-hideous-dream-125-years-ago-newspaper-coverage-of-the-johnstown-flood/ |
The Johnstown Flood is a dark and depressing story, with no cathartic payoff at the end. People aren’t brought to account, and procedures aren’t put in place to prevent it ever happening again. There are sections of the book that are undernourished, and others that are confusing, specifically in the way the floodwaters travelled.
But
for a debut from a legend in the field of popular history, The Johnstown
Flood sets the stage and the template for the McCullough approach to come,
which makes it a book worth discovering.
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