“A harrowing and laborious occupation”: preservation in the 1904 General Slocum disaster identifications

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 1904, the passenger ship General Slocum caught fire on New York City’s East River, resulting in the deaths of approximately 1,021 people. This article examines the city’s formal response to these deaths, specifically investigating the technologies deployed by city officials and employees to help overcome the natural limits of the corpse to increase the likelihood for identification. I argue that these technologies of preservation – corporeal, visual, and written – were motivated not only by the desire to assist the victim’s families but also by a new culture of urban bureaucracy that tasked municipalities with containing urban chaos. As such, this event foreshadowed an emerging modern disaster victim identification paradigm as a state-managed, bureaucratic process that both aided and alienated victims’ families.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster
• disaster victim identification
• corpse
• technology
• embalming

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Not all the victims were German or German American, but a large percent were. For demographic information on the victims, see The city record (1904, 9483). For a validated list of victims and survivors, see Lamberton (2006, pp. 266–385).

2. The most definitive account of the disaster is O’Donnell (2003); Lamberton (2006) also contains a valuable collection of primary sources related to the event. The New York Historical Society also holds an extensive collection of newspaper clippings, memorabilia, and ephemera from the Liebenow family. The original death toll for the disaster was 984, which was based on the number of tickets collected on the Slocum that morning. Later assessments returned the current number. See (Lamberton, p. 11).

3. On the longer historical arc of this modern ordering, see Bayatrizi (2008).

4. This improvisational nature remains a part of disaster identification to this day, largely because disaster events are disruptive and unique. For narrative descriptions of the identification methods used in previous disasters, see Vogel (2013), McCullough (1968), Rust (1981), and Brandt (2003).

5. For a complete bibliography documenting the post-World War II expansion of identification science, see Stewart (1970, pp. 137–154).

6. In the context of the Civil War, the identification of the dead was woven into discourses of grief, sacrifice, and national mourning. See Faust (2008); Linenthal (1991); Neff (2005).

7. The urgency of the disaster work means that few records exist that describe the rationale or motivations of the actors involved in great detail. Instead, much of the archival material consulted for this article has provided contextual information about the bureaucratic culture surrounding the identification work; in some ways, the lack of references in official reports is as telling as the more direct discussions. As a result, the information in this article is carefully pieced together from the references that do exist, especially those in the newspapers, the Department of Charities Annual Report, and the extant photographs.

8. For a full list of the involved departments, see Department of Charities Annual Report for 1905; see also Lamberton (2006, pp. 178–182); O’Donnell (2003, pp. 171–172).

9. On the American coroner system, see Jentzen (2009).

10. The Alexander Avenue station was operational for approximately one day. It is likely that Darlington’s other intention in moving all the remains to the Charities Pier was to centralise the morgue operations.

11. ‘Grief-crazed crowds view lines of dead’, New York Times (16 June 1904), p. 1.

12. Gustav Scholer Papers.

13. On the principles of urban Progressivism in America, see Wiebe (1967) and McGerr (2003).

14. No official records reference these earlier events, so the connection here is speculative. On the Iroquois fire, see Brandt (2003).

15. ‘Wholesale destruction of human life’, New York Tribune (16 June 1904), p. 2; ‘Wreck said to be cleared of bodies’, New York Times (17 June 1904), p. 1.

16. The Department of Charities also paid the local undertaking establishment J. & J.W. Stolz US$ 6278 for 250 coffins, totalling approximately US$ 180,000 in today’s currency. The City Record (14 November 1905), p. 9464.

17. ‘The Slocum dead found by the score’, New York Times (21 June 1904), p. 3.

18. On post-mortem photography in the United States, see Troyer (2020) and Ruby (1995).

19. ‘478 Corpses’, New York Sun (16 June 1904), p. 1. While it is not known why McAdoo selected the Pach Brother studio for this work, it is possible that their German heritage was a factor. Their work as portrait photographers is also worth noting, as the genre was specifically focused on faces and individuals. See also ‘Biographical Note’, http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/nyhs/pach/bioghist.html.

20. ‘Wholesale Destruction of Human Life’, New York Tribune (16 June 1904), p. 2. These images are owned privately by the Thanatos Archive. The archive has not been responsive to requests for permission to publish these images, but they are available on the Thanatos Archive Instagram page. However, their accessibility also raises serious ethical questions about how historical images of the dead should be circulated on the internet.

21. On photography and the criminal body, see Finn (2009).

22. Department of Public Charities and Corrections (1868); Personal Correspondence with Rachel Greer, Archivist, New York City Municipal Archives, March 24, 2016. For a specific example of an identification made by photograph, see ‘Claiming Her Husband’s Body’, New York Times March 3, 1880, p. 3.

23. ‘Coroner O’Gorman‘s peril’, New York Sun (25 June 1904), p. 1.

24. The annual reports for the four departments involved – Charities, Docks, Health, and Corrections – only describe their involvement in the response very briefly and do not reveal internal discussions about the handling of the dead, nor plans for establishing protocols for future events.

25. On this history of criminal science in New York, see Talbot (1983).

26. The city record, (1905, p. 9465).

27. The city record, (1905, p. 9464).

28. On the island’s history, see (Mason, 2014, pp. 10–30).

29. ‘Grief-crazed crowds view lines of dead’, New York Times (16 June 1904), p. 1.

30. This number varies be source. See (O’Donnell, p. 203) and (Northrup, pp. 70, 72).

31. ‘Grief-crazed crowds view lines of dead’, New York Times (16 June 1904), p. 1.

32. ‘Police fear an epidemic of suicides’, New York Tribune (17 June 1904), p. 2.

33. Ibid. Italics added.

34. ‘30,000 Visit the Morgue’, New York Sun (17 June 1904), p. 2.

35. On the history of morgue tourism, see Schwartz (1998) and Godbey (2006).

36. ‘Police fear an epidemic of suicides’, New York Tribune (17 June 1904), p. 2.

37. ‘47 more bodies from the Slocum’, New York Times (20 June 1904), p. 1.

38. ‘Bodies unrecovered, companies wrangle’, New York Times (18 June 1904), p. 2.

39. ‘To prevent other disasters’, New York Sun (17 June 1904) p. 5.

40. By and large, the Triangle victims were easier to identify: most victims died from smoke inhalation or falls; the disaster was ‘closed’, meaning the victims were concentrated in one area and were named on employee lists; and the number of victims was only 146 to the General Slocum fire’s 1,021. On the Triangle Fire morgue, see Stein (2011).

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Vicki Daniel

Vicki Daniel is a historian of medicine, death, and the body in the United States. Her work focuses on the relationship between technology and visual culture in disaster identification. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a Lecturer at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.