DARK TIDE

Boston native and journalist Puleo takes an incident that seems to belong in a Marx Brothers movie and resituates it in the city’s social history.

The 15-foot-high wall of molasses that inundated the streets of Boston’s North End in winter of 1919, the debut author explains, flows into such issues of the day as “immigration, anarchists, World War I, Prohibition, the relationship between labor and Big Business, and between the people and their government.” With a good sense of timing and an easy voice, Puleo sets the scene for the disaster to come: the rush to complete a giant tank holding more than two million gallons of molasses, the failure to have it properly tested, the blind eye that parent company US Industrial Alcohol turned to the tank’s copious leaks, and the threats it levied at workers who complained. The author also paints the period’s social picture. Discrimination against the North End’s Italian-born residents and their lack of political participation, whether barred from it or of their own volition, were important factors in the tank’s placement near their neighborhood. The rise of the anarchist movement and its strong antiwar sentiments made the tank a tempting target, since alcohol produced from the molasses went into the making of wartime munitions. The sheer destructive force of the molasses flood is jarringly presented in a number of vignettes about those trapped; 21 people died. In the ensuing court battle, Big Business was put on notice that it would not be trusted to police construction safety standards itself, it was not above the law, and it would be liable for damages.

Properly and compellingly recasts quaint folklore as a tragedy with important ramifications. (Photographs)