Episode 628: The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 Part II - The Boston Molassacre

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Someone brought the pebbles.

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Head to the store for pebbles.

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Fruity pebbles.

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There's no place to escape to.

This is the last time.

On the left.

That's when the cannibalism started.

What was that?

I don't know how to do this episode without Hulk Hogan being here.

Oh.

Hulk Hogan died?

My species.

You didn't even find out about that?

Yeah, I've been working.

Wow, you really work?

Yes, that's nice.

Yeah, I work without distraction.

I blare it all out, man.

No, Hulk Hogan, he died.

Yeah, man.

He's

Molasses.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He looked like Molasses.

Also, Anne Burrell from Food Network, the female equivalent of Hulk Hogan.

Turns out she committed suicide.

Yes.

Super sad.

It's very sad.

It's almost like you shouldn't start an episode with it.

Yeah, that's a really terrible thing to start with.

You could have just joked about Hulk Hogan.

He's a monster.

Ann Burrell's stuff is way more important, way sadder.

Yeah.

You mean the nice food lady was sad?

I guess that's what you want to talk about?

Yeah.

She was super sad.

She did it in a weird way.

Yeah.

Well, Hulk Hogan's heart exploded because it was the size of a pumpkin.

Yes.

And that was because it was filled with love.

Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Marcus Parks.

I'm here with Death Reporter Henry Zabrowski.

Death Reporter Henry Zabrowski.

That is,

between,

because this is the problem.

I don't know if anybody else, I'm certain the audience has like one old friend text chain that does eventually devolve into just the how we all find out somebody dies.

Right.

Yeah, that's all it is now.

The old murder fist text chain is just like, who's it's like they, it's their first.

Always.

They beat TMZ sometimes.

This time

I woke up to Hulk Hogan being dead, like two hours before it broke.

Yeah, it was interesting how much like I was unaffected by it.

I guess like if it's like a day and a half, two days after Ozzie, like, I don't, I could care less.

Yeah, who gives a shit?

He's a bad guy.

The only thing I do remember is that nothing will take back that big, bloated carcass making love to Bubba the Love Sponge wife while he was absolutely filled to the maximum brisket.

Barbecue, Phil, fucking pig.

And we have a man who sometimes feels like a pig, sometimes not.

It's Ed Larson.

That's right.

I'm a squeal American.

Oh.

Oh, yeah.

and today we are here with the great molasses flood of 1919 part two and yes we are well aware that it's blackstrap molasses yeah not backstrap molasses yes this podcast is a weekly grind sometimes a typo becomes another typo becomes another typo and then that becomes an entire bit and we made because that's the problem yeah we made an entire character out of backstrap molasses and that's where you can't then backstrap out of the bit

when you've already committed to it.

No.

I loved her.

Yeah.

I miss her.

I wish she would come back.

She can't now.

Where is she?

She's different.

I invented her.

I saw her in my mind's eye and now she's gone.

She's kissing.

She's been replaced by Blackstrap Molasses.

See, I feel like

it sounds like a pimp from a Rudy Raymond movie.

Yeah, Blackstrap Molasses is a much harder-edged name.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

No, it definitely beats the fucking shit out of anyone,

especially if you look like me.

He may be fat and he may be sweet, but Blackstrap Molasses motherfucking owns the street.

Yeah.

Yeah, man.

You may hide, you may run for cover, but Blackstrap Molasses is going to drown you up.

Come on, that's funny.

Ain't no one sweeter, ain't no one meaner than the man with back teeters and a pulverizing demeanor.

His name is Backstrap Molasses, and he's going to slap all the asses.

asses.

That's amazing.

Thank you.

I took time with it.

Although you did say backstrap again.

Fuck it.

Cut it.

Now we have to cut it.

I missed her.

So when we last left the tale of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, the wheels of history were continuing to turn.

And with each major event of the early 20th century, the molasses flood came that much closer to becoming a North End nightmare made real.

After World War I and the Spanish flu, the prohibition of alcohol in America was up next in the list of historical events that would push the molasses tank towards its breaking point.

And in early 1919, the new law of prohibition was right on the verge of being ratified as the 18th Amendment.

Yes.

You know what I like about the 18th Amendment and the 21st Amendment?

It's a very great way to remember it.

18, you're not allowed to drink anymore.

21, you can drink again.

Boom, done.

Yeah.

Never forget forget it.

It's the only amendments I know.

Yes.

Didn't we lower it to 18-2 to die in the Army?

Did we lower it?

Did it used to be higher than 18?

I think it was always 18 to die in the Army.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was like 12 at one point.

Yeah, we went up and down on the drinking age, and then it became state by state.

And then once they started attaching, you know, highway revenues to drinking age, that's when it all raised to 21.

Yeah.

I say 27 across the board.

Everything.

I'm strict as I get older.

Yeah.

Well, as a result of prohibition, the industrial alcohol manufacturers who owned the 50-foot-tall molasses tank sitting atop Boston's North End, they were racing to manufacture as much grain alcohol as possible as fast as possible.

This was being done so they could sell the grain alcohol to other companies who would make as much rum as possible because there was going to be a one-year grace period between the ratification of the 18th Amendment and the actual beginning of the prohibition era.

Alcohol would still be legal in that one-year grace period.

That was specifically put in just so all these guys could like catch up and get their stuff together for when

alcohol became illegal?

It was specifically put in to kind of get America ready for it.

Like that, you couldn't just one day say, All right, like, you know, Monday alcohol's legal, Tuesday it's illegal.

They gave everyone a year to kind of get used to the idea.

They thought it would be better, but instead, all it did was it gave organized crime a year to prepare.

Yeah, it's almost like it was done on purpose.

Yeah, almost.

Now, this industrial alcohol manufacturer, USIA, they were throwing their weight into rum specifically because even though their profits were still astronomically high, earnings had dropped following the end of World War I and the beginning of the Spanish flu epidemic.

USIA were still set to make just as much money as they had made before World War I, but the ever-gaping maw of capital meant that profits had to be on an upward trajectory at all times, no matter what.

So, any concerns people may have had about the safety of the North End Molasses Tank, which included constant leaking, constant vibrating, and constant groaning, those concerns were ignored.

Also, the tank could be filled to its maximum capacity of 2.3 million gallons, so USIA could make as much grain alcohol as possible before the prohibition deadline.

Is this a commentary on Joe Biden's campaign in 2024?

Is that what this is?

Is this a subtle dig

at that man?

No, it wasn't, but

I'm glad that you saw it that way.

It's constant leaking, vibrating, and groaning.

Yeah.

They're like, you need to do something.

No, that's fine.

We don't need to do anything.

Hunter, you got to get backstrap molasses out of your room.

You got to get it.

He's like, but, Daddy, that's how I learned to make crack cocaine.

Dad, did you know you could make crack out of molasses?

He was so

cool talking about crack on that documentary.

He was talking, Hunter Biden knows crack.

It's nice to see.

Now, Arthur P.

Jell, the man who'd rushed the construction of the tank in the first place and had overseen its operation in the years afterward, he'd given the tank only the most cursory of repairs before the arrival of the biggest shipment of molasses that the tank had ever taken.

Aside from the time that Jell had the tank painted brown to hide the molasses leaks, he'd also hired a team in December of 1918 to put a fresh layer of caulk on all the streams, as if caulk alone could hold back 26 million pounds of molasses.

Kalk alone can do nothing.

Taints a entire team.

Two balls.

I thought I'd say four balls at one time.

One hard-ass taint.

But just a few days before the tremendous molasses shipment from Cuba was supposed to arrive, it seems as if the anarchists that we mentioned in the last episode, it seemed like they were finally going to make a play to take down the tank.

Or at least that was what their public pronouncements proclaimed.

They're allowed to do PR releases as anarchists.

Everyone is.

I didn't know that they could get it together so quickly or so organized.

Oh, of course.

No, that's the thing.

They're very organized in destruction.

It's just after the destruction, they don't want to be organized.

I got

anarchism was more explained to me over the last week or so.

And it's interesting.

It's just everybody seems to have a different definition of it.

Oh, of course.

No, no, there are a million different definitions.

There's anarchists, there's anarcho-pacifists, there's all kinds.

It's a anarcho-communist.

Anarcho-dash is the favorite subtext.

I love that.

I love anarcho-dash.

Being multiple types of anarchy is anarchy.

Oh, yeah.

That's wild.

I love this.

It's fun.

Well, on January 10th, 1919, Arthur P.

Jell was contacted by the Boston police, who told Jell that a number of placards threatening violence had been tacked onto buildings near the tank.

The placards had been posted in response to congressional action made two months before that had toughened the already stringent Immigration Act by making it easier to deport anarchists specifically.

But really, the point of this was not to make it easier to deport anarchists, but easier to deport Italians.

Because Italians were the most hated immigrant group of the day, and it just so happened that many anarchists in America were also Italian.

It's not a perfect one-to-one comparison, but the anarchist-Italian argument was sort of like the 1919 version of the more recent fear-mongering about MS-13, where xenophobic dipshits used a small sliver of an ethnic immigrant group to demonize an entire segment of our population.

Unfortunately, the American people usually buy into these arguments because Americans have a bad habit of gross overcorrection when they get scared and angry.

See our reactions to 9-11 and Pearl Harbor, as well as our current immigration policy for more examples.

Pearl Harbor was appropriate, but FGR allowed it to happen.

No, no, I'm saying Hiroshima.

So you said Hiroshima and Nagasaki were appropriate?

The first four years.

Okay,

maybe Iwo goddamn Jima.

That could be.

Yeah, but I'm talking more about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And the firebombing of the rest of the firebombing of Tokyo.

That was even worse.

Killed far more people than the Tommy bombing.

But hey, we got microwaves.

And And we got Killian Murphy's fantastic performance.

So it's all worth it.

It's still, Oppenheimer was good.

I still say it didn't go hard enough.

This is my thing.

9-11 will finally be worth it once we get one decent 9-11 movie.

We've had some great World War II movies.

Yeah.

You don't like any of them, huh?

Which one's good?

I like the airplane one.

United 93?

Yeah, that one's all right.

Nah, propaganda.

Of course.

Yeah.

They're all propaganda.

Savanna Private Ryan's all so great.

And I almost joined the military because of it.

I'll watch it anytime.

It did make my grandfather.

It's ruined my life.

Savannah Private Ryan made my grandfather cry.

I want to hear one from the Building Seven's perspective.

Oh, yeah.

Talk about someone who saw everything.

Fucking offed himself.

Well, as a result of the Immigration Act of 1918, the leader of the Italian anarchists in Boston, Luigi Galliani, he'd received an order for deportation.

Luigi and his associates were considered the most dangerous foreign anarchists yet found within this country, but legal bureaucracy had delayed Galliani's deportation and he thus remained free.

So, when notices threatening violence began showing up around the tank in the North End, cops figured that those notices were probably posted by Luigi's men.

Addressed to quote,

funny how history just keeps repeating itself.

Oh, yeah.

Addressed to quote, the senile fossils ruling the United States, the main notice said, Do not think that only foreigners are anarchists.

We are a great number right here at the home.

Deportation will not stop the storm from a reaching these journeys, eh?

The storm is a within, and very soon will leap and crush and annihilate you in a blood and a fire.

You have a shown no pity to us, none.

We will do likewise, my journey.

We

You don't sound American.

Actually, and that's actually one of the rare ones you can do because your mother's, you are Italian.

Again, that's the last accent.

Yeah, Italian.

Why is that?

Jamaican?

Because there's white Jamaicans.

No.

Canadian.

Chet Hanks.

Another guy who had a stroke that came out with the petois.

I'll give you can say bumble clot.

How's about that?

Bumble clot.

Okay.

Oh, man.

What can I say?

Nothing.

He hasn't earned it yet.

Now, as we said last episode, anarchists rightly believed that pure capitalism and perpetual warfare were deeply intertwined by design.

And the molasses tank was by far the biggest symbol of both capitalism and warfare in the North End.

As such, Jell claimed to have taken the threats posed by the anarchists seriously.

But Jell had laid off most of his molasses guard after World War I officially ended on Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918.

Why?

Because he thought because the war ended overseas that he wouldn't have to worry about the molasses anymore?

Well, because he thought that he wouldn't have to worry about sabotage because the molasses was, of course, used to make industrial alcohol, which was used to make munitions, which were used in the war.

So he figured that if the war was over, then he wouldn't have to have as many guards out to protect the molasses.

All of these anarchists, though, are telling them they're angry with the jelly.

They're angry with the molasses.

They want to attack the molasses.

That's what Jell's hearing.

Unbelievable.

But while Jell did reconsider hiring his molasses guard back after the threatening notices, Jell also took the shrinking value of post-war molasses into account.

So after crunching the numbers, Jell declined to rehire his molasses guard, which to me means one of two things.

Either Jell knew that the anarchists weren't going to actually blow up a tank above an immigrant neighborhood, that of course contradicts his later statements, or he did believe that the anarchists could blow up the tank, but he decided that saving money on security was worth more than the lives of everyone who lived in the shadow of the molasses.

Wow, so Jel was the anarchist himself.

Yes, he killed his own molasses.

But also, I bet sometime he's just looking at me.

He's like, it's molasses.

How could that hurt anybody?

You know, there's, hey, who would get that molasses?

How could the poor molasses hurt anyone?

Listen, did no one, no one blames maple syrup for what happened to the Native American?

No one blames people getting into pine cone art for the destruction of the forest.

Oh, man.

See, it's crazy about it is if he, he was doing it.

So why does he care about it destroying one way, but not the other?

What do you mean?

Like, why does he care?

Why does he care about the anarchists blowing it up, but not it just blowing up itself?

Well, that's the question is that does he really care about the anarchists blowing it up?

Does he really think that it is going to at the end of the day, the only thing that matters to Arthur P.

Gel is what's going to cost the least amount of money and what's going to make him look best to his corporate masters and what's going to bring him up the corporate ladder further.

So whatever is going to, so whatever is going to be best for profit is going to be best for Arthur P.

Gel, and that drives every single decision he makes in his entire life.

So, on January 12th, 1919, a Cuban ship called the Milliero pulled into Boston's harbor carrying 1.3 million gallons of black strap molasses.

The plan was to pump 600,000 gallons into the North End tank in Boston and take the rest to USIA's other molasses facility in Brooklyn.

Whoa!

There's a Brooklyn molasses tank?

Yeah, Yeah, no, there's a whole Brooklyn molasses facility.

Where is that at?

I think it was around the naval yards.

Oh, why'd they put it by the sailors?

They love molasses.

Oh, I don't know what sailors like.

They're always like.

Yeah, there you go.

Now we're having fun.

Yeah.

And will molasses be a good lube?

I think, I think, no.

Terrible lube.

No, touching all the gear suit bottoms of all those traveled men.

You're right.

Yeah.

It's going to rip it out.

It's going to be like a Brazilian wax wild.

Know when Georgie has diarrhea?

Mm-hmm.

And get all in the hairs.

Yeah, it's almost like you would jam it up your ass to protect yourself from having sex.

Yeah, it's called a stopper.

I got the most round but dude anybody's seen on the USS Luby.

And everybody's looking to plummet, and that's why I jam it up with some good old-fashioned weapons grade black strap.

Black

strap molasses.

Despite the freezing January morning, the molasses ran smoothly from the ship to the north end tank.

But there was good reason for that.

Angry about the idea of just guys just being like, molasses going smooth.

Yeah.

How's it going?

Is it pumping good?

Yep, looking at it right now.

Real smooth.

Oh, there was actually one guy who was, you like, gave testimony.

He was like, you know, molasses.

Molasses has a mind all of its own.

Sir, you're better at your job.

It's in one place, sir.

Man never knows how molasses is going to behave until you get the molasses to where molasses need to go.

You really should know.

Well, molasses holds heat extraordinarily well.

And since all that molasses had been in Cuba just a few days before, it was still quite warm.

The molasses already in the North End tank, however, that was quite cold because it had been congealing in the Boston winter for weeks.

Now, when warm and cold molasses mix in these quantities, it creates a chemical reaction in which microscopic yeast triggers a fermentation process that produces carbon dioxide.

If you haven't figured it out already, this chemical reaction is what caused all that vibrating and rumbling inside the tank over the years.

Now, the warm molasses-cold molasses chemical reaction usually wasn't a problem, but after this particular shipment, the 50-foot-tall north end tank was filled with 48 feet and 9 inches of molasses.

I feel like you could give, you don't got to fill it to the very tippity top.

You don't have to, but that's the thing, is that they wanted to make as much alcohol as possible.

So they did fill it to the very tippity top.

Yeah, and the guy filling it, there could have been a chick watching.

He wanted to impress her.

You know, he's like, look,

see what I can do?

Oh, my God.

The molasses is so smooth.

Isn't it?

We didn't do anything about that, though.

That's just molasses.

Molasses is one of the most unpredictable substances in the whole world.

Oh, is is it?

Yeah, go ahead and put your bottom against the tank there.

I have a little party.

I want you to see here this little hole in the molasses I made with my penis last week.

You can see the exact earth

to this day.

Well, that meant that there was only three inches left in the tank.

That meant that the carbon dioxide gas didn't have anywhere to go.

So the newly created gas began to put constant pressure on the tank's steel walls.

And if you'll remember, the steel walls of the tank were 10% thinner than what was required to safely store and hold so much molasses.

I felt that way myself.

When he made a good old Lexington steel.

The original black strap molasses.

And so when the Miliero departed Boston, the tank was filled with 26 million pounds of molasses.

And as the Miliero pushed off, the captain could hear a noise emanating from the tank that was loud enough to be heard all the way from his ship in Boston Harbor.

Oh, I'm full.

I'll never make it on the ballet.

There was also just like less noise back then.

Yes.

It was a lot less noise.

Yeah, so noises were new to them.

Yeah.

Now the tank would hold.

Yeah, he never heard noises before.

Oh, man, there's a whole thing.

Actually, there really is a whole thing about noises and like, well, you know, how human beings just really like aren't built for this much noise.

And it's really fucking with us, how much noise we have to deal with nowadays.

Really?

But you like it.

Yeah, I like it.

Well, city people like it.

I like it.

Yeah, I like it.

But for some people, it actually drives them insane.

That's why you see so.

That's why like white noise is like white noise quote-unquote podcasts are like so much higher rated than ours are.

Like those get millions upon millions of hits because people, they're trying to actually block out the incredible amounts of noise that we have to deal with every day.

I don't have to check it out.

See, I hate the silence.

Silence makes me upset.

Yeah, because you grew up in a city.

Yes.

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Now, the tank would hold for three more days while the fermentation process continually created more carbon dioxide.

But the pressure that was put on the tank's walls finally reached the breaking point on January 15th, 1919.

Now, by all accounts, January 15th was a beautifully mild 40-degree day, and for the residents of Boston's North End, it almost felt like an early spring.

It's time for me to get up real early and go out there and say something hateful.

I'm not going to let Providence take, I'm spot as the most racist town in the north.

But as city workers sat outside eating their lunches and teamsters drove their horses down commercial street delivering produce, beer, and leather goods.

A terrifying sound echoed through the neighborhood at 12:41 p.m.

Oh

no!

I'm so foolish!

I'm so sick, and foolish!

Sorry, everybody.

I'm gonna go.

Oh, I can't hold it anymore.

Oh, my God.

I'm so foolish.

Yeah.

That's the most terrifying noise I've ever heard.

I don't know what noise.

What's noise?

Quite suddenly, a sound not unlike a machine gun, something like

was heard by all present, followed by a noise that was described as sounding as if it had come from a wounded beast.

Oh, God,

no, I was supposed to get a mate this year.

I'm two.

I'm a two-year-old wildebeest.

I can't hold it

what's the noise yeah like a man all I know is talking and I know harpsicon

what else is the noise what else is what's coming out what's happening in the air

what's that

yeah the molasses tank is like a man holding in diarrhea on a bus

also this is tip that's how you sit alone on the greyhound yeah you should make those noises the first noise had been the tanks thousands of rivets popping off finally forced outward by the carbon dioxide gas.

While the second noise had been the steel plates tearing away and grinding against each other as the molasses broke free.

And so the people of the North End could only stare in utter disbelief as an enormous black wall of thick liquid, 25 feet high and 160 feet wide, came to destroy their neighborhood, their families, and their lives.

And that was the morning the big brown wave came for Boston.

Be careful, that big brown is working its way downtown.

Beans can't fix that.

Nope.

Nope.

Goodbye, Bruins.

Goodbye, man who called me F-word.

Here comes the Big Brown.

Now, unlike an ocean wave whose momentum is concentrated in one direction, the the wall of molasses burst out in every direction at once.

In fact, it'd be more appropriate to call it the walls of molasses.

Yeah.

When the rivets popped, the tank's roof had fallen almost straight down.

And as it fell, it spewed the molasses in all directions, creating four walls of viscous liquid that smashed their way through everything in their path.

That's fucking cool.

Truly, I'm rooting for the molasses.

Like right now, I'm I'm on the molasses steam.

Molasses should be free.

We caged it.

See, while molasses is famously slow, the 2.3 million gallons of molasses here moved at a speed of 35 miles per hour.

And that's not even to mention the damage caused by the wreckage of the tank itself.

The steel walls turned into missiles, while the rivets that had popped out as a result of the gas, those were essentially steel bullets that shot in every direction, thousands of them.

In short order, the molasses tore the houses in its path into kindling, while other buildings, like the local firehouse, were actually lifted off of their foundations and swept into the harbor.

What is even happening?

It's the fucking molasses.

Some guy, he was one who's like, Go, Bunga.

See you guys on the other side.

And then he's just like, Mom!

He's immediately scratched.

Well, that's what we're gonna see.

Fire hoses at it.

It's molasses.

It's doing nothing.

That's what we're going to see again and again is that that really was most people's reaction was, it's the fucking molasses.

Holy shit.

It's a building-size tidal wave of molasses.

My favorite death.

It's my favorite way to die.

Obliterated by a super funny catastrophe.

Yeah.

We could only hope.

Well, even objects as large as freight cars were crushed under the molasses' weight, while every living thing, from men, women, and kids to horses, dogs, and rats, all became ensnared in the now deadly goo.

But since the molasses was sticky, it picked up everything in its path.

Do you ever play Katamari Damasi?

It's like this old PS1 game where like you, you're this little tiny Japanese cute thing and you're pushing this ball and the ball and it clicks.

It's like that.

Oh, but real.

I thought it was like the Bob Dylan song.

Which one?

A rolling stone, but it's supposed to be a rolling stone.

Well, that gathers no moss.

Exactly.

It'd be the opposite.

Fuck.

Well, the wave quickly became a wall of shrapnel and wreckage, carrying debris, furniture, and even cars.

And these objects crushed, stabbed, or simply obliterated anyone and anything in its path, except for some of the stronger buildings.

But when the molasses wall hit those buildings, it would smash into building after building.

The wave just changed directions again and again until it finally subsided and settled into a veritable molasses lake that was in some places chest deep.

Fuck.

A gunami.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

It is a gunami.

I've been thinking of this for weeks.

I guess I hadn't come up with gunami.

Yeah, that's a great term.

Way to go.

Yeah, I'm about to do one.

You know, God, just like, you know, he's sitting there and he's like, I try to think of anything.

Something innocent.

Something that could never hurt us.

Something that could never, ever be wrong.

The stay puff marshmallow man.

It's like the same thing.

Except you think of old grandma's molasses.

Yeah, that's all I thought about was shoe fly pie, and the Amish man assaulted me, and I didn't know.

That would be the last thing that we ever saw.

Nope, that's just

the destruction part of it.

Yeah, that's just like the if there are no people there.

Yeah, the actual human stories of the Great Molasses Flood, they are, in a word, terrifying.

And each story shows a different perspective of how the flood maimed and killed not only the people of the North End, but the North End itself.

So let's start with the testimony of a man named Martin Clarty, who, before the flood, was a boxing referee who specialized in Irish and Italian boxing matches.

Yeah, with the Irish ones, you got to tell one the other said something about his mother.

With the Italian ones, you do the same thing.

So the Italian ones, actually, they get a little bit more angry if it's their sister.

No, very much.

Very much.

I saved that for the championship.

bout.

They got the gloves on so they can't use their guns.

That's what's so hard.

They can't comb their hair.

Clarity, he was actually having a great day.

He'd finally saved enough money to purchase a nice home outside of the North End after selling his portion of a night spot called the Pen and Pencil Club in advance of Prohibition.

Because he was given a year to prepare.

Exactly.

Yep.

After a solid day's work, Clarity was taking a nap when he heard his sister scream that something awful had happened to the tank.

Oh, what do you mean something awful happened to the tank?

What, somebody painted it brown again?

But that tells you that the people at the North End were living in a constant state of worry about the molasses.

Because it was this giant, shivering, constantly leaking, groaning, just it's a waiting, a disaster waiting to happen.

Yeah.

And they were watching it.

And they all knew it.

Anyone who worked there was just like, you know, it's going to blow up one day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's why I'm taking my paid time off now.

Now, before Martin Clarity could even get up from his nap, he felt his entire bed overturn.

The molasses wave had broken through the walls of his home and overtaken Martin in a second.

What the fuck?

Yeah, which he said gave him the sensation of falling overboard and going underwater.

Liquid rushed into Martin's nose and mouth, and he realized at that moment that, oh fuck, I'm drowning in molasses.

This can't be the way way i go i'm not a pancake

martin said that he felt himself slide downwards as though the churn of the most violent river rapids in existence were taking him under he began flailing struggling to lift his head above the flow of molasses but he eventually used his powerful arms to break the surface enough to actually tread the molasses as he rode the massive wave that had taken him out of his house and into the street.

Once the ride finally stopped, Martin stood chest deep in molasses, but wood and debris were pressing against his back and neck.

Meanwhile, he looked over and saw that his entire house had been swept away and smashed against an elevated railroad trestle.

So, is insurance gonna cover this?

Who thinks I'm up on my molasses TV?

What's my molasses deductible?

It's zero.

You're fucked.

Finally, Martin spotted a raft-like object floating on top of the molasses.

And after wading towards it to get himself out of the goo, which clung to his clothes and hair like wet wool, he discovered that this raft was actually his own bed.

Now, as Martin began calling for his family, he saw a thin hand protruding from the molasses.

Fighting his way through the quicksand-like substance while still on the bed, Martin made it to the hand just in time to see his sister's head emerge from the black liquid.

Martin pulled her up onto the bed and wiped her eyes as she violently vomited molasses from her lungs.

But after she was safe, Martin left her to look for their mother and brother, who would both, unfortunately, die as a result of the flood.

Now, Martin's story is fucking harrowing, but it pales in comparison to what was witnessed and experienced by North End resident Giuseppe Intasca.

Giuseppe was a father of six and one of his children, Pasquale, was crouching behind the giant molasses tank when it failed on January 15th.

See, Pasquale and his friends, a pair of siblings named Antonio and Maria, they were some of the kids who regularly collected molasses from the leaking tank in pails.

And Giuseppe Intasca had been keeping an eye on the kids from his second floor kitchen window on that particular afternoon.

You get got another molasses, kid.

Yeah, daddy, we got it.

We get another bucket, a bucket of molasses.

We got it,

you got the molasses, we bring it up here now.

We bring them up, and we got the free molasses.

We got the free molasses, daddy.

How do you know Giuseppe is an Irish?

All right, that'll do that impression.

Hey, Sherry, Daddy, Molasses, Daddy.

Come on, Ronald.

See, we're all the same.

So, when the tank failed, Giuseppe could only watch as the dark wall of molasses consumed the children on its way towards destroying his own building.

And when the wave hit, Giuseppe's house trembled enough to throw him to the floor, where Giuseppe hit his head and blacked out.

No, I cannot believe they desert.

He ate them a baby.

He made a candy.

I really wish that it wasn't so funny.

You're a ton of Italian accent.

I can do an Italian accent.

Yeah, you know, it's over 100 years.

Actually, it's not about the Italian accent.

It's more about the dead children.

Yeah, fuck them.

It's been a long time.

Oh, I'm a puppet.

It turned into a rocket candy.

Now, the little girl, Maria, she had been standing directly in the path of the wave, and she died almost immediately from asphyxiation.

A firefighter had later spotted her tangled hair swirling in the sea of standing molasses, and he was therefore able to pull her body out of the liquid.

Maria's brother Antonio, however, had miraculously survived.

The wave threw him against a lamp post and cracked his skull, but another firefighter had managed to catch Antonio before the child was swallowed by the molasses completely.

But, tragically for Giuseppe and Tosca, his son Pasquale had completely disappeared.

Pasquale's body would not not be found for another five days when rescuers pulled the battered corpse from behind a railroad freight car.

When you're talking about a molasses incident, battered takes on a different turn as well.

You know what I mean?

I guess

everything's food.

Breakfast terms.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was flat as a pancake.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

You know, I'm trying to paint a picture here.

From what rescuers could surmise, the wave had picked up the freight car which smashed into Pasquale, and the wave carried them both fifty feet before the freight car hit a wall.

Once the car had crushed Pasquale into the wall, his arms, legs, pelvis, and chest had all been broken, and his face had been disfigured beyond all recognition.

In the end, the only way to identify him was by the red sweater he'd been wearing that day, which, as far as Pasquale had been concerned, was supposed to be just another afternoon collecting free molasses until a USIA worker chased him away.

Damn.

It's all about that molasses, man.

It is.

God damn.

Yeah.

Just

these kids, man.

Now, Pasquale Iontasca was not the only person who'd been carried away by the molasses.

When the tank failed, a freight clerk named Walter Merrithew was working under a covered platform on the commercial street wharf.

Walter heard a loud rumbling as he was communicating with a fellow laborer, a deaf man who couldn't speak.

And he was fine.

What do you mean he was fine?

He wasn't nervous at all.

He was because just as a shadow fell on the deaf man's face.

I would say the deaf man.

The deaf man just happily working.

No idea.

No, he was not happily working.

They were having a conversation.

The deaf man was the one who saw the wave coming.

God, that's hard because how do you mean it's so hard to spell out molasses quickly?

Well, actually, he couldn't.

All he did was he was able, he pointed and he just screamed as it gave.

I mean, he couldn't really, it was just sort of the,

they said that this painful screech of fear came from him.

And Walter almost instantly found himself in the middle of the black muck and he squeezed his eyes as he prepared to dive.

The molasses, however, had carried Walter and pinned him against the wall of the freight shed.

He was three inches above the floor.

And around him was a wall of debris, a freight car, a fucking automobile, and it even a horse, a whole horse had been swept into the freight car with him, was freaking out and struggling in the molasses.

This is all in the trailer.

Yeah.

In the movie.

This is in the trailer.

Yeah.

Better than half a horse, by the way.

Well, yes.

That's disgusting.

Sody's going to ruin all this molasses.

But as the molasses kept flowing, more debris crushed Walter against the wall.

And he continuously wiped the quickly hardening molasses from his eyes.

The debris began to move.

Walter ended up being one of the lucky ones because the co-worker who'd seen the wave first, he was able to remove enough debris to save Walter's life.

Now the Great Molasses Flood was not just a danger to the people who lived and worked in the North End.

The Boston Elevated Train actually ran right through the North End.

And on January 15th, this train was filled with midday shoppers and workers.

Now the molasses tank had been built right next to the elevated track, and the tank burst as the train was passing by, going around 20 miles an hour.

So, the train's brakeman was able to see the black mass of molasses pushing towards the track as the sound of tearing steel filled his ears.

The sound the brakeman heard was the overhead train trestle buckling, and the train began tipping off of the track as a result.

Whoa, it's like a king kong ride.

But the train rounded the bend seconds before the weight of the molasses and the missile-like tank wreckage fully destroyed the elevated trestles.

The train therefore stopped just three car lengths beyond the damaged track.

But had the train arrived seconds later, it would have likely plunged directly into the sea of molasses below, possibly killing everyone on board.

I mean, the death count would have tripled.

Wow.

This is like a scene from a Spider-Man comic book.

Yo, very much so.

Yeah.

Like the idea of like, but there's nobody there to help them.

Nope.

There was no Spider-Man.

Well, actually, this guy's like a little bit of a Spider-Man.

Ooh.

He turned, like, check that.

This is amazing.

Because when it came to the elevated train tracks, the danger didn't pass just because that particular train had escaped the molasses.

Trains run on a schedule.

Oh, yeah.

And there's another one coming right behind.

The train's brakeman, he took a second to survey the damage that the molasses had caused in just a few few short moments.

He saw there's essentially nothing left of the waterfront.

The buildings are all flattened or swept away.

Every square inch was covered in molasses.

And that's when the brakeman realized: holy fuck, there's another train coming up right behind me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

They can all see it.

Come, but he's like, No, don't come downtown.

Downtown's all breakfast.

They can't come downtown.

It's nothing but sweet and savory.

You know, if the next train came, without being warned, it's just going to plunge right down into the molasses.

And everyone on board is either going to die from the impact or they're going to drown in the molasses.

So a section of the elevated track is just gone.

Gone.

Completely gone.

I'm surprised the other one was able to stay up there.

It did.

I mean, they were three train, they were three car links ahead.

So they, I guess they just,

let's get the fuck out of here.

But the brakeman knew that the next train was coming.

So he jumped out of his train and crawled along the twisted trestle about two stories high through the track that the molasses had destroyed.

And once he got to the other side, he sprinted down the track to meet the next train.

And after the next train was in sight, he stood in the center of the track, flailing his arms, yelling for the train to stop, even though three full cars were bearing down upon him.

But thankfully, the train slowed to a stop.

And the first thing the brakeman said to the engineer was: and this is a direct quote the goddamn molasses tank burst

fuck

exactly

the goddamn I give you guys the goddamn molasses tank burst that goddamn gel is a cheap piece of shit I knew this was gonna fucking happen so you mean to tell me I'm off shift

but that tells you something else that tells you something that these train these guys these the engineers the brakemen the guys that went by that tank every day everybody they talked about it like there's gonna be a day yeah that that thing's going to fucking explode.

Yeah.

And it finally fucking did.

Now, as the.

God, it must be nice to be right, though.

You know, I mean, of course, all the bat on a certain level.

The I Told You So is so strong and so powerful that that can really carry you for weeks.

I think the I Told You So fueled the brakeman to go up and climb two stories up because that's the only thing that really motivates you.

Yeah.

Oh, mumble in the hallways.

God damn it.

God fucking fucking ass last

dreams.

Goddamn whole neighborhood.

Legally covered in shit.

Everybody's getting the free molasses watching these Italian kids covered in soap.

Now, as the brakeman sat on the tracks, he looked down to see that fire trucks and horse-drawn medical vehicles were already approaching the north end.

Police, firefighters, doctors, and nurses quickly arrived from the nearby Haymarket relief station to render what help they could.

But what they found was a nasty scene.

As one reporter put it, quote, here and there struggled a form.

Whether it was animal or human being, it was impossible to tell.

Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was.

Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly paper.

The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared.

Human beings, men and women, suffered likewise.

Your game Carlin's getting real good.

Nice.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, there wasn't anything that anyone could do for the horses.

Nay.

Yeah.

At that point, you just unfortunately got to spray him with bullets.

And at that point, you should just take the joy in that because you really never get to shoot a bunch of horses at once with machine guns.

Man, imagine how sticky it would be to make the horses into glue and molest.

Horses' insides are stickier than the outsides.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think at this point in time, horses did get hurt in urban environments so often that I think policemen had to be prepared and trained that you're gonna have to shoot a horse in the head like once a week.

Oh, yeah, and I imagine at that point they're super used to it.

Yeah, they're used to it.

But cobblestones, they're far apart sometimes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then one horse runs to the next horse, the horse, one horse breaks a leg, you got to shoot the horse in the head.

And in those first moments, survivors, still trapped in the molasses, reported that they heard scattered gunshots, which they later learned were the sounds of police putting trapped animals out of their misery.

God, that's just fucking

hear a horse creaking out and then boom.

Boom.

God.

It's either the worst day of work, but if you're a psychopath, like, finally.

That's nice.

You know,

it's just nice I can finally bring my hobby to the job.

Just one guy's like, this is just like a dream I had.

Wandering through Malatsa, shooting horses in the head.

Well, I better go get more bullets.

Finally.

You know, would it be okay if I smothered some?

Yes.

Yes.

Anything new, Brian.

Anything you like.

Well, rescuers got to work as soon as possible, trying to save as many people as they could in the hours, days, and even weeks following the Great Molasses Flood of 1919.

Now, one of the people who came to the rescue of the survivors was Dr.

George McGrath, who arrived almost an hour after the tank burst.

Dr.

McGrath had been performing an autopsy at a nearby mortuary, but when he got word of the flood, he pulled on his hip-high rubber fishing boots and drove to the scene with his assistant.

Sew up this corpse.

It's time for us to go and check out more corpses.

Yay!

Yay!

Let's get in the corpsemobile.

Let me ask you something.

You ever want a sleeping bag that looked just like a horse?

I got one for you.

Let me ask you something else.

Have you ever wanted to be with a corpse that smelled and tasted like Taffy?

Come on down, the boss.

Excellent.

Like everyone else, Dr.

McGrath found that the entire waterfront had been completely leveled and swamped by the thick molasses.

God damn, I knew.

I knew it would be molasses.

Incredibly, the molasses was still knee-deep when Dr.

McGrath arrived an hour after the disaster.

Because this happened, like, this was all pretty much on the waterfront.

So it's not like the molasses didn't have anywhere to go.

There was just so much molasses.

Yeah, Yeah, it was, what is it, 42 million?

Do you say 42 million gallons or 48 million?

2.3 million gallons.

I think like 45.

Those are 48 feet.

Yeah, that's right.

48 feet, and I think like 20 millions of pounds, but yeah, 2.3 million gallons of molasses.

And what, it just ended up in the river?

The sea, actually.

Yeah.

Well, it settled first.

A lot of it ended up in the sea.

Actually, a lot of people

still out there to this day.

Don't go in the water.

Don't go in the water.

The molasses still seeks its vengeance.

Well, how a lot of people ended up getting hurt and almost dying, and some of them actually did end up dying this way, is the molasses swept some people into the sea and they fell into the water.

It's January in Boston, pneumonia.

And yeah, a couple people did die from that.

And a couple of people, it took them like weeks to recover from it.

How trippy as fuck that must have been for a fish.

Yeah.

Don't even know what molasses is.

Yeah.

Has no screws.

What the fuck?

It's molasses.

You're like, they just learned it.

They were like, what the fuck?

Another, like, you know, or a guy, a frog has to come and be like, that's called molasses.

These fuckers put it on their food and now it's killing all of us.

It's like, my God.

Someone get me a cigarette.

Yeah.

I've always wanted to smoke.

Hello, my baby.

Hello, my baby.

Hello.

Dr.

McGrath said that he saw several people pulled from the molasses.

He later remembered that their bodies looked as if they were covered in heavy oil skins.

Their eyes, ears, mouths, and noses were filled with molasses, and people could only be identified after their bodies were washed with sodium bicarbonate and hot water.

Like seagulls.

Yes.

Eventually, Dr.

McGrath was dispatched to the house of the aforementioned boxing referee, Martin Claugherty, where Dr.

McGrath discovered what had happened to Martin's mother.

The 65-year-old woman was found dead once the molasses subsided, and her autopsy revealed that the weight of the molasses itself had crushed both her rib cage and her chest.

I'm going to go ahead and say the autopsy probably wasn't necessary.

Let me just kind of push on it.

Honestly, the reason why, the only reason why I wanted to do it, I wanted to see how thin it got her.

I was just interested.

Even though it was quite obvious that the tank had simply failed because of poor construction, both the government and representatives from the USIA were very quick to place the blame elsewhere, almost as if it had been their plan all along if something were to go wrong with the molasses.

They had an entire year to plan.

Yeah.

And that's what this all was about.

Well, Dr.

McGrath.

Not just an entire year.

I mean, all this anarchist shit, all this Italian shit, like they had just, they had this in their back pocket.

This is a sweetener-based Pearl Harbor.

This was allowed to happen for other reasons.

And I think FDR didn't allow Pearl Harbor to happen.

You keep perpetuating perpetuating this myth.

It's not true.

FDR stood up, looked out that window, saw the planes coming in, sat back down, shut the blinds silently.

You're going off of Dan Aykroyd's portrayal of FDR in the terrible movie Pearl Harbor.

He stood up, did a triple London,

saw the planes coming, ordered some sushi because it just got invented.

A couple jumping checks.

That's it.

Sat back.

Practiced the jitter buck that he was going to do later on with J.

Edgar Hoover's father.

And then

allowed it to happen.

All because his wife was gay.

Yep.

This is all about maple syrup.

This is all about destroying the molasses.

Well, this press conference, this happened while Dr.

McGrath and all the rest were still trying to find survivors.

Fucking USIA and the Boston city, they got on the business of explaining this shit away quickly.

Boston's mayor was holding a press conference alongside USIA's attorney.

The mayor did use the word accident when talking about the collapse of the tank, but he also made sure to use the word explosion.

Building off that, USIA's attorney blamed so-called outside influences for the tank's collapse, explicitly stating that it was most likely North End anarchists who planted the bomb to advance their so-called quote-unquote radical agenda.

As it happens to this day, the attorney straight up lied and said that USIA knew beyond question that the tank was not weak.

Exact opposite.

He's what you think.

It's the exact opposite of that for certain, Mr.

Mann.

Yeah.

He said an examination was made of the structure.

Not only was it made, but I made it a few minutes before the collapse.

Which means you're bad at your job.

If you fucking looked at at it

before it collapsed, it would have been fine if the anarchists hadn't put dynamite in there.

That doesn't make any sense.

It does make sense because if the anarchists you can't protect against dynamite and he's saying we inspected it a few minutes before it collapsed and everything was totally fine.

So it had to be dynamite that collapsed it.

It was leaking at a total normal rate and that's what allowed it to

release some of the pressure that made it completely safe.

And speaking of that, he also said, there's no fermentation of the molasses.

That doesn't happen.

That's an old Native American lie.

They say that to make us scared.

Scared of the molasses.

There's nothing to be scared of molasses.

It can't hurt us.

Look at it.

It's a condiment.

And he finally said that there was absolutely no evidence of structural weakness at all.

Every point, of course, was utter horseshit, and USIA knew it because people have been telling them for years, something's wrong with the molasses tank.

I remember not two weeks earlier from this day that you all were complaining about how much shit the horses were leaving in the streets.

So we did a fantastic job in our 1919 Grape Molasses Horse Culling.

Not only that, does it smell like horseshit anymore?

No.

What does it smell like?

Sweet, sweet?

Black strap molasses.

Something delicious.

Isn't that nice?

But while USIA was trying to pin their massive greed-induced fuck-up on a scapegoat with the help of the local government, Again, those anarchists do make some good points.

The people of the North End were scrambling to save the victims.

Survivors pulled from the molasses were taken to a relief station half a mile away, where nurses removed the sticky substance from the patients' breathing passages and cut off their molasses-soaked clothing.

The molasses so thoroughly soaked these people that nurses couldn't even identify gender until they saw a patient's genitals.

Hell yeah.

That makes you laugh.

I just want to know particularly why that's funny.

There's just something about like the idea of like how you figure it out.

I don't even know what the funny part about it is.

It's more just like the idea of like stick it like, you know, you know where the genitals in the general area are going to be.

Yeah.

And then you just stick your finger in it and then push till you feel the tip.

Yeah, it's like you push till it goes inside of someone.

Yeah, you're like dig it in there like a little weasel till you find a penis or a pussy.

Yeah.

And then what do you deal with all the, who knows what they identify as?

I think they sprayed them off and then said like it's a man.

And they put him up.

They sprayed him up.

It's a woman.

You know, and then ignorant.

Man,

I've always wanted to spray someone down.

You can.

Thank you.

Have you ever been sprayed down?

No, I haven't been sprayed down.

I've been searched, though.

Come to the backyard.

I'll do it.

Well, I don't want to be.

Actually, I have been sprayed down.

Yeah.

I fell in a pile of ants and my dad made me get naked in the front yard and he sprayed me down in front of the whole neighborhood.

Yeah, yeah.

I used to get sprayed down constantly just because I was a mud kid.

I loved mud, so I was constantly covered in mud, and I get sprayed down.

Out of all of us, you're the most like a golden retriever.

Yeah.

I used to get sprayed down by the local pedophile because I had the tits of a large woman.

The tawny catane of Queens.

But as a result of all this, the whole hospital soon reeked of molasses.

The floor was covered in this stuff.

It soaked the walls.

And the nurses were soon covered in that rarest of combinations, molasses and blood.

It's only rare if you haven't met Blackstrap Molasses.

And we're mixing molasses and blood every fortnight.

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Now within just an hour, the hallways of the hospital were covered with so much congealing molasses that the stretchers became immovable, and the nurses had to continuously mop the entrances and the hallways with hot water to keep the molasses from taking over completely.

But if it tells you anything about how much molasses there was and how much destruction it caused, officials knew of only nine fatalities by the end of the first day because the other 12 bodies were still buried somewhere in the path of the molasses' rampage.

Now, in an incredible coincidence, Nebraska became the 36th state to ratify prohibition the day after the molasses flood, which made prohibition the law of the land.

This, of course, was little comfort to USIA, who in the race for profit had killed 21 people and injured 150.

Excuse me, Mr.

Narrator.

Unfortunately, no, that is not the case.

We did not, we here at USIA killed no one.

It's the molasses that killed.

I want to say that because

people don't kill people.

Yeah.

Molasses kills people.

But surprisingly, even though prohibition was made law on January 17th and President Woodrow Wilson was negotiating the end of World War I in Versailles the next day, the headlines and newspapers across America were mostly focused on the great molasses flood.

Nate Hughes News, nationwide news.

Dude, they knew a good story.

Yeah.

Now within 24 hours of the flood, the molasses had hardened enough where rescue workers had to use chisels, saws, and shovels to break it free.

But ultimately, they used millions of gallons of seawater to loosen up the remaining substance.

What do you do that not only has 9-11 vaguely happened to you, but it's also turned the entire area of 9-11 into a Werther's original?

Yeah, yeah, it really is.

It's just, and it's January.

In my mind, I'm like, ah, you just fucking deal with it in April.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we're like, well, you know what?

North End right now, that's Molasses Country.

All right.

You go, if you want to go to North End, that's fine, but be a biscuit.

Okay, because there ain't nothing else going on there.

Once loosened, the fire department had to use hydraulic pumps to siphon thousands of gallons of molasses from the cellars of stores and tenements.

But while Boston City workers tirelessly endeavored to clear up the debris and the molasses, USIA supplied absolutely no assistance with the cleanup until the public shamed them into helping.

Pricks!

I think it was that they saw it as like, well, if we help with the cleanup, that's a tacit admission of guilt.

Yeah, like, because in some way they're like, no, we can't clean up the molasses.

That's the evidence of the anarchist movements.

We got to follow the footprints in the molasses to

their anarchist syndicate

hidey holes.

They have hiding holes.

It's your molasses.

Go get it.

It's your molasses.

Now, this molasses belongs to the people who want it.

I donated

it.

I cannot believe.

I spent so many days trying to get the molasses out of the tank.

Now, molasses is everywhere.

It's not like all my work done.

It ain't no good.

But even with just the city workers participating in the cleanup, molasses was spread across all of Boston as these workers tracked the molasses home.

The goo covered subway platforms.

It was on subway seats.

You picked up a payphone, and the payphone was covered in molasses.

Because anywhere the people of Boston went, so went the leavings of the great molasses flood.

That's so fucking annoying.

Yeah, everything's sticky.

Yeah.

The whole city is sticky.

That's fun.

Do you remember that one summer when New York just stunked bad?

And it was just like, we're like, even the mayor was trying to figure out what happened.

And then he's like, it's Jersey.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They blamed it on Jersey.

No, workers said that the small mercy here was that the tragedy did not occur during the summer.

In warmer weather, 30 to 40 children would have been playing in the North End Park, and all of them would have been drowned in molasses.

Additionally, the number of summertime rats that would have been attracted by the sweet molasses would have been almost as horrible as the flood itself.

And the amount of insects and flies that would have covered the stuff would have been nearly unimaginable.

But how fun for the Boston rat.

Oh my god, the rat orgies.

That didn't happen.

They're just like, yes!

Finally,

Rats get one!

So excited.

And the rat kings that would have been created by the stickiness.

Just all the flies.

The flies would have died very easily, though.

They would have gone in there and they would have died and they would have come out.

It just would have been like...

But I just don't know if like piles and piles of dead flies are also like super healthy.

I think every single inch of the molasses would have been covered in a fly or an insect of some kind.

Yeah, and then dead, because that's the thing is that they would die and then more flies would go on top of that.

And then the birds are coming to get the bugs and then the birds would get stuck.

And then the cats are coming for the birds and the cats are getting stuck and then the dogs.

You do have an interesting slippery slope that I agree with.

Yeah.

Total pandemonium.

I thought it would be an innocent day.

Now, interestingly, when a judge released an inquest report for the Superior Criminal Court assigning blame for the disaster, he did not assign sole responsibility to the USIA, but he didn't say it was anarchist either.

Rather, the judge said that the flood could ultimately be blamed on the people of Boston themselves.

Fucking asshole.

The judge lambasted the public for its failure to adequately fund city inspection departments and for its failure to staff said departments with qualified people.

This is on you.

Yes.

I want every member of the city of Boston in my chamber now.

It literally is just like, yappy, yappy, yappy, yappy.

I'm looking at you, you lazy broke fucks.

That's exactly what he said.

He said, you can't provide yourself with just 50% of what you need and then complain when shit goes wrong.

Wow, that is just like, you know, you can just be like, you know,

I don't need this right now.

You know, I mean, I get it.

Like, what do you fucking expect?

Capitalists are going to capitalize.

And if you don't watch them like a fucking hawk, they will cut corners and people will die.

And even if you're worried about higher taxes, the inevitable accidents and tragedies that come from not keeping an eye on things always ends up costing far more than the tax that would have prevented it is what the judge said you see that's that's technically like again in theory so sure i guess it's just like right now no this is the time to dude i fucking

right now no i fucking get it it's like when uh the like we just had these floods in uh texas that could have been war if they hadn't cut so much from the fucking weather if they would have cut so much from like weather reporting, then the warning systems would have been in place.

But when you bring that up, they're like, don't politicize the tragedy.

I'm fucking with this guy 100%.

The judge is fucking right.

He's 100% fucking right.

And you got to fucking say it.

When the levy's broke in New Orleans, man, it's the same shit.

All I know is that I think they're consistent with these.

They're happy, though.

They wanted it this way.

The Texas people, they were really excited for this.

For the death of all the children?

Yeah.

No, they weren't.

No, but I'm saying they voted for it, though, so they were super excited for it.

It is what they voted for.

You know, they always, Texans always just,

they really do have this great,

it's not like they have cognitive dissonance at all when it comes to the bad things that happen to them and the way they vote.

They just, man, they put it together every time.

They really do.

I'd say 40% of them are cool.

We'll see.

We'll see.

But in the end, the judge did ultimately place the blame mostly on USIA, saying that the only assignable crime was manslaughter through negligence because the tank was wholly insufficient in structural strength to handle its load and it met neither its legal nor engineering requirements.

Now if you just look at my little molasses tank I have my own backyard, you'll see here I got three feet on the other side because even though this is a smaller tank, I don't want it to explode, ruin my roses.

Well the Boston DA took this report and presented it to a grand jury.

But in an infuriating move, the jury disagreed on criminal negligence and ruled that there was insufficient evidence for a manslaughter indictment.

Therefore, no criminal charges were brought against anyone for the molasses flood.

Now, the USIA became emboldened by the grand jury's failure to issue indictments.

So, in a brief statement, they put the onus back on the anarchists by saying that, quote, evilly disposed persons had used dynamite to blow up the tank.

Ironically, though, USIA's refusal to take any responsibility for the tank disaster may have led to three incidents that very well could have actually been committed by vengeful anarchists who were out to prove a point.

It's like you say that you create your villain and then the villain shows up.

Exactly.

Eight months after the Molasses disaster, two of USIA's Molasses steamers vanished without a trace while traveling from the Caribbean to the northeast.

Not only did they vanish without a trace, there was no radio contact that said Mayday, Mayday.

They were just gone.

These disappearances were both bizarre and unprecedented, and it is possible that a sudden explosion could have obliterated any evidence of both ships.

Well, a month after that, USIA's other molasses processing facility, the one in Brooklyn, it was destroyed by a fire.

Although, again, ironically, the only thing that was undamaged, the tanks that were holding the molasses.

Yeah, because they were built properly, like Brooklyn Union men.

Yep.

But even so, the Brooklyn plant was closed down.

And in a classic case of failing upward, USIA found it in their hearts, even amidst all this turmoil, to promote Arthur P.

Gell to assistant treasurer and vice president of the company, just a little under a year after the molasses flood.

They deserve every fucking thing that happens to them.

I've got an idea here, guys.

I got a new idea for my next big tank.

Instead of worrying about using molasses to make weapons, I have an idea about making a giant morocca filled with weapons.

We just get the guns and keep them in a big giant, shakeable morocco.

And that way, it's fun.

It makes a fun noise.

It's very Spanish.

Yeah, as far as the molasses is concerned, we learned the hard way.

Last time we put the big bucket on top of a hill.

This time, top of a mountain.

Dancy, you gotta make the hill bigger so that the molasses has more fun on its way to the city.

The only question I have is can we build it around a community of brown people that it may kill one day?

How about about white people that we make brown?

Exactly.

Okay,

with radiation.

We'll give them spots.

But that is not quite the end of the story.

So the people of Boston are nothing if not tenacious.

And when the grand jury refused to hold anyone responsible for so much death and destruction, the survivors consolidated 119 separate legal claims against USIA for a full civil trial before a jury.

Now USIA, of course, stuck with the anarchist line in their defense, which was led by a lawyer with the appropriately terrible name of Charles Choate.

Call me Charlie!

Some people thought I was making legal business because of the nature of my voice.

I am so bad.

I'm not sure where we're going.

Charlie Choate does sound like a man who used to be a fish.

I was.

Now I'm a lawyer.

Tank's perfect.

Beautiful, even.

Sexual to behold.

I'd marry her if I could.

Gang's clothes and not a girl's hair.

Cho did argue in his opening statements.

He said the tank was perfect.

Perfect.

Tank's beautiful.

And it only failed because an anarchist dropped a bomb inside.

Little after the breakfast.

All right, Choat's getting close to Bill.

So you got to think.

Worry Worry about the fact that Theo is dead and it makes me sad.

Every impression Henry does, if he does it long enough, becomes Bill Cosmo.

Every time.

It's in his bones.

Take it out.

Tank girls are sparry spectacle.

You got, I say, you got a problem with the tank.

I bought you in this world to take out.

Choate, where'd you get that horrible sweater?

Yo, I made it.

I had the venue make it.

Now, science was very much on the side of the plaintiffs, but I, my God,

the opening statement made on behalf of the plaintiffs by attorney Damon Everett Hall is one of the best I have ever heard.

This is a small excerpt from the picture that Damon Everett Hall painted in court.

Now, I have no doubt that, Your Honor, I had occasion to see many of the devastated areas of France.

If you take a little section of one of those devastated areas and you put in it dead men and dead horses, and then you cover it in molasses.

You get some idea of what this scene looked like a few minutes after this occurrence on January 15th, 1919.

Direct quote.

Direct fucking quote.

You'd put some dead men in it, you take some dead horses, you cover it in molasses.

That's what it was.

If you take a little section, take a man, devastate a friend, you cover in molasses.

That's it.

Boom, done.

The USIA spent the modern equivalent of $750,000 on expert testimony.

They even went so far as to have a scientist from MIT build a 30-foot-tall model tank, fill it with molasses, and drop dynamite inside.

I have to say thank you so much for this money.

This is the best afternoon I've ever had.

I mean, honestly, imagine getting that call and telling that that's what you have to do today.

On it.

Doing it right now.

Fuck!

Yes!

Absolutely!

Dropping everything!

Going by how the plates were similarly damaged in both the test and the actual tank, USIA was confident in their argument.

In the end, though, the facts won out.

Amongst the most damning testimony came from the people who actually made the steel plates, who admitted that the thickness of the plates they delivered was less than what was called for in the plans.

They just sort of did like a my bad.

We made them super thin, so

they took them.

They didn't say nothing.

That was exactly what they said.

Like, they didn't say nothing, so we thought, meh, they must like it.

Yeah.

But in the end, it was the plaintiff's own explosives experts who sunk USIA.

Attorney Damon Everett Hall brought in five sailors who'd been stationed on ships in Boston Harbor that day, and all five of them had been ordnance machinists and detonation workers during World War I.

The most haunted men in the world that it had to watch desert destroy half a city.

They testified that they'd heard rumbling sounds like thunder when the tank collapsed.

But all of them were adamant that what they heard was nothing like the thunder they heard a thousand times over during the war.

Therefore, that thunder was not dynamite.

Pretty good witness.

Very good witness.

Five.

No less.

Now, Arthur P.

Jell was indeed brought to the stand, and he predictably did not do very well.

He fell over.

I should have had my hand.

I should have had my training wheels.

He admitted that he did not have anyone examine the steel upon its delivery, nor did he ask for any tests on the steel before the tank's construction.

I trust my workers.

I trust steel.

I said, Jell, no.

Absolutely not.

This is what he said.

He said he relied on the steel company's reputation as all the proof he needed that the tank would hold.

Going off of Jell's testimony, the plaintiffs brought in their own MIT scientist.

That scientist found that the tension in those particular plates should not have exceeded more than 18,000 pounds per square inch.

The scientist then testified that on the day of the flood, the molasses was exerting pressure of 31,000 pounds per square inch, nearly double what it could actually take.

I will maybe explain it in a way that the jury can understand.

You know how you enter into a restaurant, and you are one size.

When you go and consume one, two, three cheeseburgers, one,

two plates of French fries, one appetizer of mozzarella sticks, you will find the pressure inside of what I call the fupa.

This area is a new scientific term called the fupa.

Exerts extreme pressure upon the pants.

And the only way to relieviate such pressure, as you can see,

uh-oh, is to unbuckle the pants and remove the front of the pants.

And that's what the tank did.

Good audio on the belt buckle.

Thank you.

I've been doing a lot of foley.

Well, that's all to say that USIA had built a 50-foot-tall, 2.3 million-gallon tank over one of America's most congested neighborhoods with no knowledge whatsoever of the tank's strength nor any knowledge of the tank's capability to withstand the pressure that would be exerted by the molasses within.

In other words, USIA looked at the tank, looked at the neighborhood, and said, fuck them.

Now, attorney Damon Everett Hall took his sweet time with his side of the case.

He spent two years calling a parade of witnesses.

Wives who lost their husbands, mothers who watched their sons die, breadwinners who'd lost their ability to work.

I didn't tell y'all this trial would be hilarious.

What sadass parade.

It's the saddest.

In response.

You can still smell the molasses on the shirt.

You can still see the brown stains on her trembling cleavage.

You can still see the markings of the tank good when that when the spike shot out of it on her sweet, delectable housewife room.

Well, in response to all this, all Charles Choate could say for the defense was that at least those who lost loved ones, at least they died quickly.

Yeah, it's the best part.

The best part quickly smashed, immediately crushed.

That's my favorite.

Seemingly unable to suppress his inner villain, Choate also argued that the two children who died, he argued that they were trespassing at the time of their deaths, so their families should not be entitled to damages regardless.

Hey, these little Italians were stealing molasses.

Yeah.

They should have stole war.

Yep.

On company property.

See.

But finally, after 341 days of testimony.

Jesus fucking Christ.

And that's on defense and like that's both sides.

Yeah, 341 days.

What does the jury do?

Sit there.

Yeah.

That must have been so annoying.

How do they work?

What do they do during that time period?

I don't know.

I guess they get a stipend.

I feel bad enough.

This is two episodes, much less 341 days.

Yeah, and that's 341 working days.

The hearings finally ended four and a half years after the flood.

USIA was found fully liable and eventually paid the modern equivalent of $10 million to the victims, the city, and the businesses that were destroyed.

That is not enough.

That is not that much.

Well, that's the thing is that it was actually the court,

their first ruling was the modern equivalent of $4 million.

And then that's when Damon Everett Hall went to Charles Choate and said, like, that's fucking nothing.

He's like, if you don't, if we don't go and get this figured out right now, we're taking damages to a jury trial and we're starting this fucking thing all over again.

Because you mean to tell me you're going to watch your father and his horse drown to death in molasses and then you're going to go up like a stick of gum?

Yeah, that's what that is.

Yeah.

And that's, that was actually the second, that was Charles Choate and Everett and Damon Everett Hall hashing it out.

It took them about two hours and then finally like, okay, yeah, $10 million.

But that's the modern equivalent of $10 million.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that was between so many different people.

I mean, we got 150 people hurt, 21 dead, all the horses, all the houses, all the businesses.

That ain't shit.

No, it ain't.

Now, concerning the long history of the molasses trade in Boston, the flood ended that 300-year tradition in a matter of minutes.

That's probably good.

Yeah.

Soon after, molasses prices dropped even further as sugar replaced it as a sweetener, and companies found cheaper and easier ways to produce industrial alcohol without molasses.

But interestingly, the flood also had long-term impacts on construction standards in America.

Boston began requiring that all calculations from engineers and architects be filed with their plans.

That practice soon became standard across the country, although I suppose we'll all find out soon enough if there's still people in government actually checking these calculations after the recent so-called government efficiency measures.

See, if the molasses flood tells us anything, it's that without safeguards and regulations, corporations will risk the lives of human beings or even sacrifice entire populations if it means that the company's stock price will go up even a little.

For a current example, one of Elon Musk's AI data centers is at this very moment choking the life out of an entire neighborhood in Memphis.

Musk's Grok facility is producing so much air pollution that residents can't breathe in their own homes.

And this is also his AI, his stupid fucking Grok AI, is powerful enough to get government contracts, which it will undoubtedly fuck up just as badly as it's fucked up everything else it's done.

Again, the anarchists have points.

Hey, Grok might be really, really good at writing half-bad

like essays for your freshman year college.

Yeah, I mean, Grok, I mean, that's the thing is that Grok is technically very good at threatening to rape people on Twitter.

And I mean, to be honest, I think people got that on lock.

I don't think we needed to.

Yeah, we're really good at that.

Yeah, I feel like that's like, we got that cover.

Yeah.

Maybe it should blow up another spaceship.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

That's what Groc should do.

But as I said before, capitalists are going to capitalize no matter how fucking stupid or useless their product is.

It's all about profit.

And just as they've been doing throughout history, corporations will kill, exploit, or even enslave people without conscience in the pursuit of profit unless they are forced to do otherwise.

But concerning the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, perhaps the strangest epilogue in this story is the ghost of of the molasses itself.

Oh, I'm so full, so big.

Reportedly, Boston's entire North End smelled like molasses for decades afterwards.

It was said that well into the 1960s, remember this happened in 1919, well into the 1960s, the basements of the buildings along Commercial Street still smelled like the sweet substance that had killed 21 people and injured 150 almost a half century before.

And all of it had occurred because one corporate lackey's desire for a promotion collided with the tide of history.

Wow.

It's time to go get some molasses.

Yeah.

Let me try it now.

I'm surprised I have not bought any since we started this.

If there was a substance that you would die in, but you'd be sort of vaguely happy to die in, what would that substance be?

Gas.

Wow.

Two distinctly different answers.

Wow.

That's amazing.

Michter's bourbon.

That's mine.

But I'm going to do that the old-fashioned way.

A couple of glasses a day at a time.

Go down patreon.com/slash last podcast on the left and watch us do this.

This is a great episode, Marcus.

You did a great job.

Thank you very much.

Really, great, great.

And again, thank you, of course, to the researchers.

As always, did a fantastic job on this one.

Yeah, and next week, I believe we're coming back to True Crime.

We are.

Big true, massive true crime story.

True crime.

Let's say it's a post-9-11 true crime.

Yeah, some new stuff, which I'm actually very excited.

Hot shit.

Super hot shit.

And if you want to follow us on all the socials, you can find us on TikTok and Instagram at LP on the Left.

You can also check out all of our new YouTube channels, Someplace Underneath, LPN Romantic, Who's the Bee, The Foreign Report, No Dogs in Space, and LPN TV.

And don't forget to come see us on tour.

Go to lastpodcastoneft.com to see where we're coming.

And the rest of this year, we're going all over this fucking country.

Yeah, we are, doggy down.

That's right.

In August 8th, we're going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Come out to these shows.

August 9th, Durham, North Carolina.

September 20th, St.

Paul, Minnesota.

October 11th, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

October 25th, Oakland, California.

November 29th, Cleveland, Ohio.

And December 12th and 13th.

We're going to be in big old stinky dinky Portland.

Yeah, I can't wait, man.

I cannot wait.

You know what's funny about Columbus?

The most that we've been asked by people to open for us.

Really?

I think that's a city that I've never had a city so many people being like, can I open?

Yeah, well, we're doing Columbus for side story.

That's what I mean.

Yeah.

Well, that's Travis Irvine's territory.

Yeah, that's just, that's because it's Travis's.

Yeah, that's Travis's town.

He's got his gang there.

Yeah.

I remember he's got Comeboy.

Comeboy's there.

There's another guy there.

Tomato Joe.

Oh, yeah.

Dookie Don.

That's right.

Well,

you're joking, but Tomato Tom, Tomato tomato and cumboy are real.

Those are Travis' henchmen.

Yeah, Cumboy and Tomato Joe are people.

Oh, they're real, huh?

Yeah.

Yeah.

God, I probably know them.

That's the worst part.

Oh, you might.

Yeah.

You might.

Oh, well, I take it back, Tomato Joe.

Anything that Tomato Joe or Comboy may have done or said over the years has nothing in common with LPN.

No.

We merely know of their existence.

Just understand that right now, I mean, it's fine.

They don't have electricity.

I just can't wait till Cumboy finally becomes Cumman.

Yeah.

Hey, it just takes one one bullet.

Speaking of cumboys, happy birthday, Rob.

Yeah.

Happy birthday, our main cumboy.

Our main cumboy, Rob.

We wouldn't be half the show we are without you, Rob.

Thank you for all your work.

No,

I wouldn't call you.

I wouldn't say you're a tomato Joe.

You're more of a Rudabaga, Rob.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I say you're.

I'll take it as a win.

Yep.

Well, wish our cumboy happy birthday on social media.

I'll see.

Hug it.

Hell, Aussie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's poppin', listeners?

I'm Lacey Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it.

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Want to know about the fake heirs?

We got them.

What about a career con man?

We've got them too.

Guys that will wine and dine you and then steal all your coins.

Oh, you know they are represented because representation matters.

I'm joined by guests like Nicole Beyer, Ira Madison III, Conan O'Brien, and more.

Join the congregation and listen to Scam Goddess wherever you get your podcasts.

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