Popular historian David McCullough is something of a legend — and deservedly so. Few in his generation have ever equaled, let alone surpassed, his ability to construct a richly textured and deeply researched historical narrative. This gem, his first full length book, is every bit as good as his eventual Pulitzer Prize-winners, “John Adams” and “1776.” First published in 1968, two full decades before the centennial remembrance, “Johnstown Flood” is an epic story, told fully, clearly and convincingly.
The story, from start to finish, reads like an outline for a major Hollywood disaster film, the type of summer blockbuster directed by Ron Howard and starring some A-list action hero (Liam Neeson would be a natural) with lots of high definition, computer animated special effects. The fact that I literally hadn’t “seen this movie before” was perhaps the biggest surprise of the entire read.
To begin with, rarely has history served up such a perfect platter of “bad guys.” The ultimate culprit in the devastating Johnstown Flood of May 31, 1889 was the South Fork dam, located some 14 miles up the valley from the bustling blue collar iron city outside of Pittsburgh. The primary function of the dam in 1889 was to maintain a 3-mile-long, mile-wide, and 6o-foot-deep manmade lake stocked with trout for a millionaire’s summer camp, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. It would be hard to find a fuller representation of the venal Robber Baron (or in today’s terms, “1%ers”) lifestyle personified than this elitist club. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick were members, as were future cabinet members Andrew Mellon and Philander Knox.
The dam had originally been built to feed the Main Line canal to Pittsburgh during the dry Pennsylvania summers, but was rendered obsolete by the new Pennsylvania Railroad nearly as soon as it was completed. There had long been questions about the earthen dam, but many presumed that it was stable because some of the most powerful forces in modern America had ensured then that it was, first the Pennsylvania Railroad and then the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, whose membership boasted the crème-de-la-crème of Pittsburgh high society.
The storm that hit central Pennsylvania (and the general Midwest) on May 30, 1889 was epic. The author confesses that “…there is no doubt that the storm, which brought on the failure of the dam, was without precedent…” Water fell from the sky in sheets and without let up. Downtown Johnstown was already under several feet of water on the afternoon of May 31, 1889 when the South Fork dam began to give way.
A consistent theme developed by McCullough is that concerns about the dam were long standing among the resident in the valley below, but there was a belief that the rich and powerful men who ran the Club had it under control and eventually a “boy-who-cried-wolf” dynamic developed. “There was talk about the dam breaking,” McCullough quotes a survivor remarking later, “and they said there had been rumors but it never came, and so I thought that was how it would be this time.”
Best of all, and as usual, McCullough provides vivid and arresting first hand accounts of the tragedy as it unfolded, enveloping men, women and children, many of whom refused to believe until the final moments that the long-talked-about calamity had actually occurred. “The bursting of the South Fork dam was about like turning Niagara Falls into the valley for thirty-six minutes,” he writes. It took nearly an hour for the surge to reach Johnstown, and when it did it was marked by an ominous black mist ahead, the accompanying sound of thunder, and the absence of water until the final push. “It was a race for life,” survivor William Henry Smith recalled. “There was seen the black head of the flood, now the monster Destruction, whose crest raised high in the air, and with this in view even the weak found wings for their feet.”
As awful as the Biblical flood surge had been, the aftermath was nearly as bad. Indeed, “several of the [Civil War] veterans were saying [that the night after the flood] was the worst night they had ever been through,” according to contemporary accounts. “The stench everywhere was terrible, of burned plaster and sodden bedding, of oil-soaked muck, of water thick with every kind of filth, and, worst of all, of still unfound bodies.” It was for many, both believers and non-believers, the apocalypse.
In the end, 2,209 were counted as immediate victims, or roughly 10% of the entire valley population. The list of casualties fills 17 double columned pages in the back of “The Johnstown Flood,” which is a sobering experience to peruse. McCullough heaps on further, powerful context: 99 whole families were wiped out; 663 bodies were never identified; skeletal remains were unearthed as late as 1906. The silver lining is that typhoid and dysentery could have been even bigger killers, but were kept in check by hordes of altruistic volunteers from all around the country, including Clara Barton and the Red Cross, which arrived right after the flood and stayed for over 5 months.
“The Johnstown Flood [was] the biggest news story since the murder of Abraham Lincoln,” McCullough writes. News of the flood, much of it inaccurate rumor mongering, at least at first, took up the entire front page of The New York Times for 5 days, and for other papers two full weeks. Over $3.5M in donations (over $100M in today’s dollars) poured in from around the country and the world, not including the trainloads of food and supplies, although total property damagers were eventually estimated at $17M.
The Johnstown Flood was the greatest disaster to hit the United States up to that time (the 1900 Galveston hurricane, 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 would eventually eclipse the Johnstown death count), but most of the locals were convinced that it was not a “natural” disaster. Rather, it was murder by negligent engineering. “The dam was simply a gigantic heap of earth dumped across the course of a mountain stream between two low hills,” it was claimed. The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club officials that inspected and worked on the dam had no credentials and contributed nothing. “In other words,” the author summarizes, “the job had been botched by amateurs.” Nevertheless, “Not a nickel was ever collected through damage suits from the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club or from any of its members.” A miasma of injustice seems to hang over the benighted Pennsylvania valley.
The Johnstown Flood is a terrible and fascinating chapter in American history, once as big as Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, combined; yet today it is remembered by few and understood by even less. I can’t imagine that any thoughtful American would be disappointed in their decision to read this book.
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